Harold Titus's Blog - Posts Tagged "a-philip-randolph"
Civil Rights Events -- March on Washington -- August 28, 1963
The 1963 event was officially dubbed the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Its main aims were racial equality and full employment for blacks and whites. Unemployment was rising then, especially among minorities. And although there had been several major pushes for equal rights over the last decade, little progress had been made. By 1962, civil rights legislation (to prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or sex) was stalled in Congress, and U.S. President John F. Kennedy was unwilling to lend any help [sources: Erickson, Penrice].
Frustrated, civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph [president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and vice president of the AFL-CIO] proposed a march on Washington to demand equal rights and jobs for all. But the response from mainstream civil rights organizations was tepid [source: Penrice]. Then King signed on. Suddenly, the idea began to pick up steam. Civil rights groups that often disagreed with each other banded together -- the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League, the Conference of Racial Equality (CORE), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
In June 1963, a date was set: Aug. 28, 1963. The buzz was 100,000 would attend, mainly blacks. Many people became unnerved. Mainstream media wondered if the march would devolve into a riot. President Kennedy asked organizers to call off the march, but they refused. So to help ensure public safety, liquor stores and bars were shuttered that day. Stores hid or moved their valuable items. Federal employees were given the day off. And innumerable military personnel were on standby (McManus 1-2).
Rachelle Horowitz, an aide to Bayard Rustin, interviewed in 2013 declared:
A. Philip Randolph [president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters] had tried to put on a march in 1941 to protest discrimination in the armed forces and for a fair employment policy commission. He called off that march when FDR issued an executive order [prohibiting discrimination in the national defense industry]. But Randolph always believed that you had to move the civil rights struggle to Washington, to the center of power. In January 1963, Bayard Rustin sent a memo to A. Philip Randolph in essence saying the time is now to really conceive of a big march. …
John Lewis, chairman of SNCC, added:
A. Philip Randolph had this idea in the back of his mind for many years. When he had his chance to make another demand for a March on Washington, he told President Kennedy in a meeting at the White House in June 1963 that we were going to march on Washington. It was the so-called “Big Six,” Randolph, James Farmer, Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, Martin Luther King Jr. and myself. Out of the blue Mr. Randolph spoke up. He was the dean of black leadership, the spokesperson. He said “Mr. President, the black masses are restless and we are going to march on Washington.” President Kennedy didn’t like the idea, hearing people talk about a march on Washington. He said, “If you bring all these people to Washington, won’t there be violence and chaos and disorder and we will never get a civil rights bill through the Congress?” Mr. Randolph responded, “Mr. President, this will be an orderly, peaceful, nonviolent protest.”
Harry Belafonte said; “We had to seize this opportunity and make our voices heard. Make those who are comfortable with our oppression—make them uncomfortable—Dr. King said that was the purpose of this mission.”
Joyce Ladner, SNCC activist, had a practical motive for supporting a march.
At that point, the police all over Mississippi had cracked down so hard on us that it was more and more difficult to raise bond money, to organize without harassment from the local cops and the racists. I thought a large march would demonstrate that we had support outside our small group.
Harry Belafonte would bring celebrity support.
To mobilize the cultural force behind the cause—Dr. King saw that as hugely strategic. We use celebrity to the advantage of everything. Why not to the advantage of those who need to be liberated? My job was to convince the icons in the arts that they needed to have a presence in Washington on that day. Those that wanted to sit on the platform could do that, but we should be in among the citizens—the ordinary citizens—of the day. Somebody should just turn around and there was Paul Newman. Or turn around and there was Burt Lancaster. I went first to one of my closest friends, Marlon Brando, and asked if he would be willing to chair the leading delegation from California. And he said yes. Not only enthusiastically but committed himself to really working and calling friends (Oral 4-8).
On July 2, 1963, leaders from six civil rights groups — A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr., Whitney M. Young Jr., James Farmer, Roy Wilkins and John Lewis — announced plans for a March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. These men all wanted equality for black Americans, but the tactics and methods they adopted often varied.
These leaders also disagreed on who should handle march logistics. Randolph wanted to put Bayard Rustin in charge, as Rustin was a skilled organizer — during the bus boycott in Montgomery, Rustin had counseled King on nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience. But Rustin was gay (he'd been arrested in 1953 on a "morals" charge), had joined the Communist Party for a short time and had gone to prison for refusing to serve during World War II.
The solution was for Randolph to become march director and select Rustin as his deputy; Rustin then set up an office in Harlem and got to work. His tasks included getting funds for a sound system, having brochures printed, arranging for drinking water and directing volunteers to prepare boxed lunches. Plus he had to plan for how many toilets the crowd — 150,000 were hoped for — would require (Kettler 1-2)!
Volunteers prepared 80,000 50-cent boxed lunches (consisting of a cheese sandwich, a slice of poundcake and an apple). Rustin marshaled more than 2,200 chartered buses, 40 special trains, 22 first-aid stations, eight 2,500-gallon water-storage tank trucks and 21 portable water fountains (Oral 3).
Rustin did everything from coaching volunteer marshals in nonviolent crowd control techniques to creating a 12-page manual for bus captains, instructing them on issues like where to park their vehicles and locate bathrooms for passengers. He managed to divvy up the limited podium time among competing interests without angering anyone (McManus 6).
There was wariness and anger in Washington, D.C. about the march, which opposing politicians denounced as a Communist plot. President John F. Kennedy feared that any disturbance could derail his proposed civil rights legislation (though he eventually accepted the march and offered some support). Two Southern Democrats in Congress even tried to legislate the demonstration away — one wanted to halt mass protests while a civil rights bill was under consideration, the other attempted to outlaw interstate travel for "any conduct which would tend to incite to riot."
Three weeks before the march, Senator Strom Thurmond read out details of Rustin's 1953 arrest on the Senate floor. However, given Thurmond's stance as a staunch segregationist, no one broke with Rustin. Eleanor Holmes Norton, who worked in Rustin's Harlem office, later noted, "I'm sure there were some homophobes in the movement, but you knew how to behave when Strom Thurmond attacked."
Anna Arnold Hedgeman, the sole female member of the march's administrative committee, had spent years battling for civil rights and knew how much of a contribution women had made to the movement: Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, Diane Nash fought to continue Freedom Rides when others wanted to quit and countless women faced danger in order to register voters.
Given all this, Hedgeman and others wanted a female speaker for the march. But Rustin cited the overloaded program as a reason not to add anyone else (he also felt other women would get jealous if just one were chosen). As the march's date approached, Hedgeman wrote a letter to the committee to demand a female speaker, noting, "It is incredible that no woman should appear as a speaker at the historic March on Washington Meeting at the Lincoln Memorial."
In the end, a "Tribute to Negro Women" was added to the program. At the march, Daisy Bates, who'd helped the Little Rock Nine as they'd integrated their school system, read a prepared statement, then several women who'd contributed to the movement were named. It was a compromise, but it didn't offer a female civil rights speaker.
With violence expected, Washington planned to have 6,000 officers — police, marshals and National Guardsman — on hand on August 28, with thousands more soldiers available at nearby bases. (Kettler 3-5).
… some of the march's most vocal dissidents were black, namely Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X. Carmichael was a civil rights activist and later the leader of SNCC. But over time he moved away from King's theory of nonviolence and toward one of self-defense; he also coined the "black power" slogan. The March on Washington, in Carmichael's view, was "only a sanitized, middle-class version of the real black movement," so he refused to attend. Black nationalist leader and Nation of Islam spokesman Malcolm X bitterly referred to the event as "The Farce on Washington" and discouraged fellow Nation of Islam members from attending. Curiously, he himself attended (McManus 9).
The potent symbolism of a demonstration at the Lincoln Memorial—timed to coincide with the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation and following President John F. Kennedy’s announcement in June that he would submit a civil rights bill to Congress—transfixed the nation (Oral 2).
Rachelle Horowitz commented:
It was about 5:30 in the morning, it’s gray, it’s muggy, people are setting up. There’s nobody there for the march except some reporters and they start annoying Bayard and pestering him: “Where are the people, where are the people?” Bayard very elegantly took a piece of paper out of his pocket and looked at it. Took out a pocket watch that he used, looked at both and said, “It’s all coming according to schedule,” and he put it away. The reporters went away and I asked, “What were you looking at?” He said, “A blank piece of paper.” Sure enough, eventually, about 8:30 or 9, the trains were pulling in and people were coming up singing and the buses came. There’s always that moment of “We know the buses are chartered, but will they really come.”
Courtland Cox, a SNCC activist, said:
Bayard and I left together. It was real early, maybe 6 or 7 in the morning. We went out to the Mall and there was literally no one there. Nobody there. Bayard looks at me and says, “You think anybody is coming to this?” and just as he says that, a group of young people from an NAACP chapter came over the horizon. From that time, the flow was steady. We found out that we couldn’t see anyone there because so many people were in buses, in trains and, particularly, on the roads, that the roads were clogged. Once the flow started, it was just volumes of people coming.
Civil right activist Barry Rosenberg related:
I could hardly sleep the night before the march. I got there early. Maybe 10:30 in the morning, people were milling around. There were maybe 20,000 folks out there. It was August; I forgot to wear a hat. I was a little concerned about getting burned up. I went and got a Coke. When I got back, people just poured in from all directions. If you were facing the podium, I was on the right-hand side. People were greeting each other; I got chills, I got choked up. People were hugging and shaking hands and asking “Where are you from” (Oral 11-12)?
Attendance climbed to about 250,000. The huge procession headed down Constitution Avenue to the Lincoln Memorial without the march's leaders, who had to hurry to the front. John Lewis recalled:
Early that morning the ten of us [the Big Six, plus four other march leaders] boarded cars that brought us to Capitol Hill. We visited the leadership of the House and the Senate, both Democrats and Republicans. In addition, we met on the House side with the chairman of the judiciary committee, the ranking member, because that’s where the civil rights legislation will come. We did the same thing on the Senate side. We left Capitol Hill, walked down Constitution Avenue. Looking toward Union Station, we saw a sea of humanity; hundreds, thousands of people. We thought we might get 75,000 people showing up on August 28. When we saw this unbelievable crowd coming out of Union Station, we knew it was going to be more than 75,000. People were already marching. It was like “There go my people. Let me catch up with them.” We said, “What are we going to do? The people are already marching! There go my people. Let me catch up with them.” What we did, the ten of us, was grab each other’s arms, made a line across the sea of marchers. People literally pushed us, carried us all the way, until we reached the Washington Monument and then we walked on to the Lincoln Memorial.
Joyce Ladner said: “As the day passed a lot of individual people were there. Odetta and Joan Baez and Bobby Dylan. They began warming up the crowd very early, began singing. It was not tense at all, wasn’t a picnic either. Somewhere in between; people were happy to see each other, renewing acquaintances, everyone was very pleasant” (Oral 12-14).
“It’s a pleasure being here and nice being out of jail. And to be honest with you, the last time I’ve seen this many of us, Bull Connor was doing all the talking.” — Activist and comedian Dick Gregory
Juanita Abernathy remembered:
I don’t know where that march started out. It looked like we marched forever before we got to the Mall. You were used to marching; you wear comfortable shoes so your feet won’t hurt and you don’t get blisters. We got to the stage and Coretta [Scott King] and I sat on the second row. Mahalia [Jackson] sat on the first row, because she was singing. We were on the left side of the stage. I wanted to scream, we were so happy, we were ecstatic. We had no idea it would be that many people—as far as you could see there were heads. What I called a sea of people; because all you could see was people, everywhere, just a sea of heads and what jubilation. Which said to us in the civil rights movement: “Your work has not been in vain. We are with you. We are part of you” (Oral 12-17).
Several male civil rights leaders gave speeches, as did union and religious leaders. In his talk, Randolph said, "Those who deplore our militants, who exhort patience in the name of a false peace, are in fact supporting segregation and exploitation. They would have social peace at the expense of social and racial justice. They are more concerned with easing racial tension than enforcing racial democracy" (Kettler 1-4).
John Lewis, interviewed in 2013, had this to say about his speech.
I started working on my speech several days before the March on Washington. We tried to come up with a speech that would represent the young people: the foot soldiers, people on the front lines. Some people call us the “shock troops” into the delta of Mississippi, into Alabama, southwest Georgia, eastern Arkansas, the people who had been arrested, jailed and beaten. Not only our own staffers but also the people that we were working with. They needed someone to speak for them.
The night before the march, Bayard Rustin put a note under my door and said, “John, you should come downstairs. There’s some discussion about your speech, some people have a problem with your speech.”
The archbishop [of Washington, D.C.] had threatened not to give the invocation if I kept some words and phrases in the speech. In the original speech I said something like “In good conscience, we cannot support the administration’s proposed civil rights bill. It was too little, too late. It did not protect old women and young children in nonviolent protests run down by policemen on horseback and police dogs.”
Much farther down I said something like “If we do not see meaningful progress here today, the day will come when we will not confine our marching on Washington, but we may be forced to march through the South the way General Sherman did, nonviolently.” They said, “Oh no, you can’t say that; it’s too inflammatory.” I think that was the concern of the people in the Kennedy administration. We didn’t delete that portion of the speech. We did not until we arrived at the Lincoln Memorial.
It was at the back side of Mr. Lincoln that Mr. Randolph and Dr. King said to me, “John, they still have a problem with your speech. Can we change this, can we change that?” I loved Martin Luther King, I loved and admired A. Philip Randolph, and I couldn’t say no to those two men. I dropped all reference to marching through the South the way Sherman did. I said something like “If we do not see meaningful progress here today, we will march through cities, towns and hamlets and villages all across America.” I was thinking about how I was going to deliver the speech. I was 23 years old and it was a sea of humanity out there that I had to face (Oral 9-10, 18).
It was Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech that is best remembered at the event.
Courtland Cox: What’s interesting was not only the crowd all the way to the Reflecting Pool, but that people were up in trees, they were everywhere. When King started speaking, and as he was speaking, Mahalia Jackson began like a chant and response. She was like his amen corner. She kept saying “Tell ’em Rev” the whole time he was speaking. She was just talking to him.
Julian Bond: When Dr. King spoke, he commanded the attention of everybody there. His speech, with his slow, slow cadence at first and then picking up speed and going faster and faster. You saw what a magnificent speechmaker he was, and you knew something important was happening (Oral 19-20).
Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity.
But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition.
…
America has given the Negro people a bad check; a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check- a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.
We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. … Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.
… This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. …
The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone (Dream 1-3).
As the speech was winding down, Mahalia Jackson, a close friend of King's, felt it needed to go in a different direction. So she shouted to him from behind the podium, "Tell them about the dream, Martin!" And he did, improvising that well-loved section from speeches and sermons he had given in the past (McManus 10).
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self evident; that all men are created equal."
…
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today.
…
When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last" (Dream 4-6).
Joyce Ladner: Medgar Evers’ death was a subtext of the march. Everyone was aware that one of the truly great heroes in the Deep South had just been murdered. And therefore, Mr. President, your request that we go slow doesn’t make sense.
Rachelle Horowitz: The podium sort of cleared. Those of us who had worked on the march, the staff people and the SNCC staff, stood at the bottom of the memorial. We linked arms and we sang “We Shall Overcome” and we probably cried. There were some SNCC people who were cynical about Dr. King and we forced them to admit it was really a great speech.
John Lewis: After the March, President Kennedy invited us back down to the White House, he stood in the doorway of the Oval Office and he greeted each one of us, shook each of our hands like a beaming, proud father. You could see it all over him; he was so happy and so pleased that everything had gone so well.
Joyce Ladner: After the march, all the people had left and a group of SNCC people were standing there with remnants of things to clean up. This small group of people had to go back south. We were dedicated to going south, to take this giant problem on, fighting the problem we had left behind.
My sister Dorie and I walked back to the hotel. In the lobby, Malcolm X was holding forth. He was talking about the “Farce on Washington.” Reporters and others were crowded around him. His ideal would have been, you take your freedom, grab it, not ask the government to free you. I do recall very clearly wondering who was right, King and us or Malcolm?
Actor and future director Ken Howard: One thing about the march: It was a step. You have to realize the tumultuousness of the times. Just a few weeks later, four little black girls got blown up at a church in the South. After the march, you had the feeling that things will change—and then these little girls were killed. As they said about the walk on the moon, it was a “small step,” but it was a step nonetheless that people heard. The loss of those girls was sad, but it was another step, because individuals began to see there was an injustice being done.
Only in retrospect do you see just how each little piece enabled a building to be built. Who would have thought a minister from a small black church in Atlanta would have a monument on the Mall? You wouldn’t think a minister from a small black church would be a “drum major” in a movement helping a people gain their rights as citizens. It’s only from the mountaintop of time that you see that it all made a difference. Each individual thing played a role (Oral 21-25).
Works cited:
“An Oral History of the March on Washington.” Smithsonian Magazine. July 2013. Web. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/histor...
Kettler, Sara. “March on Washington: The Activists Who Took a Stand for Equality.” Biography. August 25, 2017. Web. https://www.biography.com/news/march-...
“Martin Luther King Jr., The March on Washington Address.” University of Delaware. Web. http://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson...
McManus, Melanie Radzicki. “How the March on Washington Worked.” How Stuff Works.com. August 26, 2013. Web. https://history.howstuffworks.com/his...
Frustrated, civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph [president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and vice president of the AFL-CIO] proposed a march on Washington to demand equal rights and jobs for all. But the response from mainstream civil rights organizations was tepid [source: Penrice]. Then King signed on. Suddenly, the idea began to pick up steam. Civil rights groups that often disagreed with each other banded together -- the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League, the Conference of Racial Equality (CORE), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
In June 1963, a date was set: Aug. 28, 1963. The buzz was 100,000 would attend, mainly blacks. Many people became unnerved. Mainstream media wondered if the march would devolve into a riot. President Kennedy asked organizers to call off the march, but they refused. So to help ensure public safety, liquor stores and bars were shuttered that day. Stores hid or moved their valuable items. Federal employees were given the day off. And innumerable military personnel were on standby (McManus 1-2).
Rachelle Horowitz, an aide to Bayard Rustin, interviewed in 2013 declared:
A. Philip Randolph [president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters] had tried to put on a march in 1941 to protest discrimination in the armed forces and for a fair employment policy commission. He called off that march when FDR issued an executive order [prohibiting discrimination in the national defense industry]. But Randolph always believed that you had to move the civil rights struggle to Washington, to the center of power. In January 1963, Bayard Rustin sent a memo to A. Philip Randolph in essence saying the time is now to really conceive of a big march. …
John Lewis, chairman of SNCC, added:
A. Philip Randolph had this idea in the back of his mind for many years. When he had his chance to make another demand for a March on Washington, he told President Kennedy in a meeting at the White House in June 1963 that we were going to march on Washington. It was the so-called “Big Six,” Randolph, James Farmer, Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, Martin Luther King Jr. and myself. Out of the blue Mr. Randolph spoke up. He was the dean of black leadership, the spokesperson. He said “Mr. President, the black masses are restless and we are going to march on Washington.” President Kennedy didn’t like the idea, hearing people talk about a march on Washington. He said, “If you bring all these people to Washington, won’t there be violence and chaos and disorder and we will never get a civil rights bill through the Congress?” Mr. Randolph responded, “Mr. President, this will be an orderly, peaceful, nonviolent protest.”
Harry Belafonte said; “We had to seize this opportunity and make our voices heard. Make those who are comfortable with our oppression—make them uncomfortable—Dr. King said that was the purpose of this mission.”
Joyce Ladner, SNCC activist, had a practical motive for supporting a march.
At that point, the police all over Mississippi had cracked down so hard on us that it was more and more difficult to raise bond money, to organize without harassment from the local cops and the racists. I thought a large march would demonstrate that we had support outside our small group.
Harry Belafonte would bring celebrity support.
To mobilize the cultural force behind the cause—Dr. King saw that as hugely strategic. We use celebrity to the advantage of everything. Why not to the advantage of those who need to be liberated? My job was to convince the icons in the arts that they needed to have a presence in Washington on that day. Those that wanted to sit on the platform could do that, but we should be in among the citizens—the ordinary citizens—of the day. Somebody should just turn around and there was Paul Newman. Or turn around and there was Burt Lancaster. I went first to one of my closest friends, Marlon Brando, and asked if he would be willing to chair the leading delegation from California. And he said yes. Not only enthusiastically but committed himself to really working and calling friends (Oral 4-8).
On July 2, 1963, leaders from six civil rights groups — A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr., Whitney M. Young Jr., James Farmer, Roy Wilkins and John Lewis — announced plans for a March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. These men all wanted equality for black Americans, but the tactics and methods they adopted often varied.
These leaders also disagreed on who should handle march logistics. Randolph wanted to put Bayard Rustin in charge, as Rustin was a skilled organizer — during the bus boycott in Montgomery, Rustin had counseled King on nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience. But Rustin was gay (he'd been arrested in 1953 on a "morals" charge), had joined the Communist Party for a short time and had gone to prison for refusing to serve during World War II.
The solution was for Randolph to become march director and select Rustin as his deputy; Rustin then set up an office in Harlem and got to work. His tasks included getting funds for a sound system, having brochures printed, arranging for drinking water and directing volunteers to prepare boxed lunches. Plus he had to plan for how many toilets the crowd — 150,000 were hoped for — would require (Kettler 1-2)!
Volunteers prepared 80,000 50-cent boxed lunches (consisting of a cheese sandwich, a slice of poundcake and an apple). Rustin marshaled more than 2,200 chartered buses, 40 special trains, 22 first-aid stations, eight 2,500-gallon water-storage tank trucks and 21 portable water fountains (Oral 3).
Rustin did everything from coaching volunteer marshals in nonviolent crowd control techniques to creating a 12-page manual for bus captains, instructing them on issues like where to park their vehicles and locate bathrooms for passengers. He managed to divvy up the limited podium time among competing interests without angering anyone (McManus 6).
There was wariness and anger in Washington, D.C. about the march, which opposing politicians denounced as a Communist plot. President John F. Kennedy feared that any disturbance could derail his proposed civil rights legislation (though he eventually accepted the march and offered some support). Two Southern Democrats in Congress even tried to legislate the demonstration away — one wanted to halt mass protests while a civil rights bill was under consideration, the other attempted to outlaw interstate travel for "any conduct which would tend to incite to riot."
Three weeks before the march, Senator Strom Thurmond read out details of Rustin's 1953 arrest on the Senate floor. However, given Thurmond's stance as a staunch segregationist, no one broke with Rustin. Eleanor Holmes Norton, who worked in Rustin's Harlem office, later noted, "I'm sure there were some homophobes in the movement, but you knew how to behave when Strom Thurmond attacked."
Anna Arnold Hedgeman, the sole female member of the march's administrative committee, had spent years battling for civil rights and knew how much of a contribution women had made to the movement: Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, Diane Nash fought to continue Freedom Rides when others wanted to quit and countless women faced danger in order to register voters.
Given all this, Hedgeman and others wanted a female speaker for the march. But Rustin cited the overloaded program as a reason not to add anyone else (he also felt other women would get jealous if just one were chosen). As the march's date approached, Hedgeman wrote a letter to the committee to demand a female speaker, noting, "It is incredible that no woman should appear as a speaker at the historic March on Washington Meeting at the Lincoln Memorial."
In the end, a "Tribute to Negro Women" was added to the program. At the march, Daisy Bates, who'd helped the Little Rock Nine as they'd integrated their school system, read a prepared statement, then several women who'd contributed to the movement were named. It was a compromise, but it didn't offer a female civil rights speaker.
With violence expected, Washington planned to have 6,000 officers — police, marshals and National Guardsman — on hand on August 28, with thousands more soldiers available at nearby bases. (Kettler 3-5).
… some of the march's most vocal dissidents were black, namely Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X. Carmichael was a civil rights activist and later the leader of SNCC. But over time he moved away from King's theory of nonviolence and toward one of self-defense; he also coined the "black power" slogan. The March on Washington, in Carmichael's view, was "only a sanitized, middle-class version of the real black movement," so he refused to attend. Black nationalist leader and Nation of Islam spokesman Malcolm X bitterly referred to the event as "The Farce on Washington" and discouraged fellow Nation of Islam members from attending. Curiously, he himself attended (McManus 9).
The potent symbolism of a demonstration at the Lincoln Memorial—timed to coincide with the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation and following President John F. Kennedy’s announcement in June that he would submit a civil rights bill to Congress—transfixed the nation (Oral 2).
Rachelle Horowitz commented:
It was about 5:30 in the morning, it’s gray, it’s muggy, people are setting up. There’s nobody there for the march except some reporters and they start annoying Bayard and pestering him: “Where are the people, where are the people?” Bayard very elegantly took a piece of paper out of his pocket and looked at it. Took out a pocket watch that he used, looked at both and said, “It’s all coming according to schedule,” and he put it away. The reporters went away and I asked, “What were you looking at?” He said, “A blank piece of paper.” Sure enough, eventually, about 8:30 or 9, the trains were pulling in and people were coming up singing and the buses came. There’s always that moment of “We know the buses are chartered, but will they really come.”
Courtland Cox, a SNCC activist, said:
Bayard and I left together. It was real early, maybe 6 or 7 in the morning. We went out to the Mall and there was literally no one there. Nobody there. Bayard looks at me and says, “You think anybody is coming to this?” and just as he says that, a group of young people from an NAACP chapter came over the horizon. From that time, the flow was steady. We found out that we couldn’t see anyone there because so many people were in buses, in trains and, particularly, on the roads, that the roads were clogged. Once the flow started, it was just volumes of people coming.
Civil right activist Barry Rosenberg related:
I could hardly sleep the night before the march. I got there early. Maybe 10:30 in the morning, people were milling around. There were maybe 20,000 folks out there. It was August; I forgot to wear a hat. I was a little concerned about getting burned up. I went and got a Coke. When I got back, people just poured in from all directions. If you were facing the podium, I was on the right-hand side. People were greeting each other; I got chills, I got choked up. People were hugging and shaking hands and asking “Where are you from” (Oral 11-12)?
Attendance climbed to about 250,000. The huge procession headed down Constitution Avenue to the Lincoln Memorial without the march's leaders, who had to hurry to the front. John Lewis recalled:
Early that morning the ten of us [the Big Six, plus four other march leaders] boarded cars that brought us to Capitol Hill. We visited the leadership of the House and the Senate, both Democrats and Republicans. In addition, we met on the House side with the chairman of the judiciary committee, the ranking member, because that’s where the civil rights legislation will come. We did the same thing on the Senate side. We left Capitol Hill, walked down Constitution Avenue. Looking toward Union Station, we saw a sea of humanity; hundreds, thousands of people. We thought we might get 75,000 people showing up on August 28. When we saw this unbelievable crowd coming out of Union Station, we knew it was going to be more than 75,000. People were already marching. It was like “There go my people. Let me catch up with them.” We said, “What are we going to do? The people are already marching! There go my people. Let me catch up with them.” What we did, the ten of us, was grab each other’s arms, made a line across the sea of marchers. People literally pushed us, carried us all the way, until we reached the Washington Monument and then we walked on to the Lincoln Memorial.
Joyce Ladner said: “As the day passed a lot of individual people were there. Odetta and Joan Baez and Bobby Dylan. They began warming up the crowd very early, began singing. It was not tense at all, wasn’t a picnic either. Somewhere in between; people were happy to see each other, renewing acquaintances, everyone was very pleasant” (Oral 12-14).
“It’s a pleasure being here and nice being out of jail. And to be honest with you, the last time I’ve seen this many of us, Bull Connor was doing all the talking.” — Activist and comedian Dick Gregory
Juanita Abernathy remembered:
I don’t know where that march started out. It looked like we marched forever before we got to the Mall. You were used to marching; you wear comfortable shoes so your feet won’t hurt and you don’t get blisters. We got to the stage and Coretta [Scott King] and I sat on the second row. Mahalia [Jackson] sat on the first row, because she was singing. We were on the left side of the stage. I wanted to scream, we were so happy, we were ecstatic. We had no idea it would be that many people—as far as you could see there were heads. What I called a sea of people; because all you could see was people, everywhere, just a sea of heads and what jubilation. Which said to us in the civil rights movement: “Your work has not been in vain. We are with you. We are part of you” (Oral 12-17).
Several male civil rights leaders gave speeches, as did union and religious leaders. In his talk, Randolph said, "Those who deplore our militants, who exhort patience in the name of a false peace, are in fact supporting segregation and exploitation. They would have social peace at the expense of social and racial justice. They are more concerned with easing racial tension than enforcing racial democracy" (Kettler 1-4).
John Lewis, interviewed in 2013, had this to say about his speech.
I started working on my speech several days before the March on Washington. We tried to come up with a speech that would represent the young people: the foot soldiers, people on the front lines. Some people call us the “shock troops” into the delta of Mississippi, into Alabama, southwest Georgia, eastern Arkansas, the people who had been arrested, jailed and beaten. Not only our own staffers but also the people that we were working with. They needed someone to speak for them.
The night before the march, Bayard Rustin put a note under my door and said, “John, you should come downstairs. There’s some discussion about your speech, some people have a problem with your speech.”
The archbishop [of Washington, D.C.] had threatened not to give the invocation if I kept some words and phrases in the speech. In the original speech I said something like “In good conscience, we cannot support the administration’s proposed civil rights bill. It was too little, too late. It did not protect old women and young children in nonviolent protests run down by policemen on horseback and police dogs.”
Much farther down I said something like “If we do not see meaningful progress here today, the day will come when we will not confine our marching on Washington, but we may be forced to march through the South the way General Sherman did, nonviolently.” They said, “Oh no, you can’t say that; it’s too inflammatory.” I think that was the concern of the people in the Kennedy administration. We didn’t delete that portion of the speech. We did not until we arrived at the Lincoln Memorial.
It was at the back side of Mr. Lincoln that Mr. Randolph and Dr. King said to me, “John, they still have a problem with your speech. Can we change this, can we change that?” I loved Martin Luther King, I loved and admired A. Philip Randolph, and I couldn’t say no to those two men. I dropped all reference to marching through the South the way Sherman did. I said something like “If we do not see meaningful progress here today, we will march through cities, towns and hamlets and villages all across America.” I was thinking about how I was going to deliver the speech. I was 23 years old and it was a sea of humanity out there that I had to face (Oral 9-10, 18).
It was Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech that is best remembered at the event.
Courtland Cox: What’s interesting was not only the crowd all the way to the Reflecting Pool, but that people were up in trees, they were everywhere. When King started speaking, and as he was speaking, Mahalia Jackson began like a chant and response. She was like his amen corner. She kept saying “Tell ’em Rev” the whole time he was speaking. She was just talking to him.
Julian Bond: When Dr. King spoke, he commanded the attention of everybody there. His speech, with his slow, slow cadence at first and then picking up speed and going faster and faster. You saw what a magnificent speechmaker he was, and you knew something important was happening (Oral 19-20).
Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity.
But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition.
…
America has given the Negro people a bad check; a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check- a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.
We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. … Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.
… This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. …
The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone (Dream 1-3).
As the speech was winding down, Mahalia Jackson, a close friend of King's, felt it needed to go in a different direction. So she shouted to him from behind the podium, "Tell them about the dream, Martin!" And he did, improvising that well-loved section from speeches and sermons he had given in the past (McManus 10).
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self evident; that all men are created equal."
…
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today.
…
When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last" (Dream 4-6).
Joyce Ladner: Medgar Evers’ death was a subtext of the march. Everyone was aware that one of the truly great heroes in the Deep South had just been murdered. And therefore, Mr. President, your request that we go slow doesn’t make sense.
Rachelle Horowitz: The podium sort of cleared. Those of us who had worked on the march, the staff people and the SNCC staff, stood at the bottom of the memorial. We linked arms and we sang “We Shall Overcome” and we probably cried. There were some SNCC people who were cynical about Dr. King and we forced them to admit it was really a great speech.
John Lewis: After the March, President Kennedy invited us back down to the White House, he stood in the doorway of the Oval Office and he greeted each one of us, shook each of our hands like a beaming, proud father. You could see it all over him; he was so happy and so pleased that everything had gone so well.
Joyce Ladner: After the march, all the people had left and a group of SNCC people were standing there with remnants of things to clean up. This small group of people had to go back south. We were dedicated to going south, to take this giant problem on, fighting the problem we had left behind.
My sister Dorie and I walked back to the hotel. In the lobby, Malcolm X was holding forth. He was talking about the “Farce on Washington.” Reporters and others were crowded around him. His ideal would have been, you take your freedom, grab it, not ask the government to free you. I do recall very clearly wondering who was right, King and us or Malcolm?
Actor and future director Ken Howard: One thing about the march: It was a step. You have to realize the tumultuousness of the times. Just a few weeks later, four little black girls got blown up at a church in the South. After the march, you had the feeling that things will change—and then these little girls were killed. As they said about the walk on the moon, it was a “small step,” but it was a step nonetheless that people heard. The loss of those girls was sad, but it was another step, because individuals began to see there was an injustice being done.
Only in retrospect do you see just how each little piece enabled a building to be built. Who would have thought a minister from a small black church in Atlanta would have a monument on the Mall? You wouldn’t think a minister from a small black church would be a “drum major” in a movement helping a people gain their rights as citizens. It’s only from the mountaintop of time that you see that it all made a difference. Each individual thing played a role (Oral 21-25).
Works cited:
“An Oral History of the March on Washington.” Smithsonian Magazine. July 2013. Web. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/histor...
Kettler, Sara. “March on Washington: The Activists Who Took a Stand for Equality.” Biography. August 25, 2017. Web. https://www.biography.com/news/march-...
“Martin Luther King Jr., The March on Washington Address.” University of Delaware. Web. http://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson...
McManus, Melanie Radzicki. “How the March on Washington Worked.” How Stuff Works.com. August 26, 2013. Web. https://history.howstuffworks.com/his...
Civil Rights Events -- Dr. King and the Vietnam War -- Aftermath
The Riverside audience responds to Dr. King's address with tremendous enthusiasm. John Bennet states, "There is no one who can speak to the conscience of the American people as powerfully as Martin Luther King" (Aftermath 1).
“I felt lifted up,” John Lewis said. “I thought he would become much more aggressive in trying to get our country and people in high places in our government to put the issue of poverty and hunger back on the American agenda” (Hedin 7). I came away from that evening inspired. I still believed, in the face of so much that seemed to be falling apart, that slowly, inexorably, in ways I might not be able to recognize or figure out, we were continuing to move in the direction we should, toward something better. I wasn't in the midst of the movement anymore, not at the moment, but I knew I would get back to it.
President Johnson, leaders of both parties, and most of the political establishment react with predictable fury and condemnation, not just at Dr. King's opposition to the war but even more so to his placing the war in a broader context of colonialism that directly challenges the anti-Communist premise of Cold War foreign policy (Aftermath 1).
… Johnson rescinded an invitation to the White House and authorized the FBI to increase its surveillance campaign to discredit and destroy him. Other civil rights leaders spurned him. Even the NAACP issued a statement disavowing King’s sentiments (Burrell 4).
One White House advisor tells the president that King, "who is inordinately ambitious and quite stupid," has "thrown in with the commies," because he's "in desperate search of a constituency." FBI Director Hoover tells the president that "Based on King's recent activities and public utterances, it is clear that he is an instrument in the hands of subversive forces seeking to undermine our nation." Carl Rowan, head of the U.S. Information Agency and one of the highest-ranking Afro-Americans in the Executive branch, publishes a red-baiting article in Reader's Digest — the most widely-read magazine in the nation — calling King an egomaniac under the sway of Communist agents (Aftermath 1).
Ralph Bunche, who was the first African-American to win a Nobel Peace Prize, said King “ought not be both a civil rights leader and an anti-war spokesman” and should give up one role or the other (Suggs 1).
By one count, some 168 major newspapers condemned the speech. …
"He has diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country and to his people," The Washington Post declared (Krieg 5). “King has done a grave injury to those who are his natural allies…and… an even graver injury to himself” (Suggs 2). The Post called King’s recommendations “sheer inventions of unsupported fantasy” and opined that, “many who have listened to him with respect will never again accord him the same confidence” (Burrell 1).
The New York Times, too, published a damning assessment, titled "Dr. King's Error," arguing that it was "both wasteful and self-defeating" to link Vietnam with domestic inequity and unrest.
"Dr. King," the piece resolved, "makes too facile a connection between the speeding up of the war in Vietnam and the slowing down of the war against poverty" (Krieg 5).
“There are no simple or easy answers to the war in Vietnam or to racial injustice in this country… Linking these hard, complex problems will lead not to solutions but to deeper confusion” (Hedin 6).
The San Antonio Express ruled that King, "gripped" by some "strange logic," was "tragically wrong in his viewpoint."
"If King and his group really want to help themselves," it continued, "they can show a spirit of support now lacking that will make the impression in Hanoi that America is not greatly divided in its determination to honor the commitment in Vietnam."
Others were less measured in their language. Life magazine described the speech as "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi," while James Marlow, in his analysis for The Associated Press, suggested King's drawing together Vietnam and civil rights was a cynical attempt to reclaim the "limelight."
"Some Negro leaders publicly disagreed with these latest tactics of King," he wrote. "Since he needs all the white and Negro support he can get to start the civil rights movement rolling again, it's hard to see how he did it anything but injury."
"Martin Luther King Crosses the Line," The Cincinnati Enquirer blared, calling his words "arrant nonsense."
The "unctuous" King "has been something of a hindrance to the civil rights movement since he was awarded the Nobel Peace prize," they wrote. "Since the award, he has specialized in speaking in Olympian tones, rather than addressing himself to the practicalities of the civil rights movement" (Krieg 6-7).
Fearing to appear unpatriotic in a time of war, much of the Black press echoes the criticisms of white media. The Pittsburgh Courier says King is "tragically misleading American Negroes," on issues that are, "too complex for simple debate." The New York Amsterdam News urges Afro-Americans to "rally around the country" and support President Johnson (Aftermath 2).
Articulating the opinion of conservative Republicans, LIFE magazine describes the speech as:
"A demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi. ... [King] goes beyond his personal right to dissent, ... when he connects progress in civil rights here with a proposal that amounts to abject surrender in Vietnam ... King comes close to betraying the cause for which he has worked so long."
…
Committed to the Democratic Party and its Cold War liberalism, NAACP and Urban League leaders rush to reaffirm — once again — that they do not stand with Dr. King. The NAACP Board of Directors adopts a resolution labeling any attempt to merge the civil rights and peace movements, "A serious tactical mistake." Former NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall who is now LBJ's Solicitor General and soon to be Supreme Court appointee, acknowledges King's right to dissent on foreign policy, but "not as a civil rights leader." During a personal encounter, Whitney Young of the Urban League accuses King of abandoning the poor for the antiwar movement. King retorts, "Whitney, what you're saying may get you a foundation grant, but it won't get you into the Kingdom of Truth" (Aftermath 2)
A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin refused to talk about it [the speech] in the press. Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young distanced themselves from him. Black media that had chronicled his every step since the Montgomery Bus Boycott a decade earlier railed against him … (Suggs 2).
All of these denunciations show that the liberal civil rights establishment, which included the Democratic Party, many media outlets, and civil rights organizations, were only comfortable with the King that spoke of dreams and racial progress, and allowed liberals to remain secure in their condescension toward the South, without having to examine their own assumptions or the policies they had crafted. The liberal establishment did not want to hear a black public intellectual who was not talking about the foibles of black people or how much progress black people had made. And civil rights organizations did not want to endanger relationships with the federal government or white philanthropic organizations that provided much of their operating funds (Burrell 4).
For Dr. King, the most surprising — and disheartening — rebuke comes from his long-time friend, ally, and co-worker Bayard Rustin who defends King's "right to debate" the war but tells Blacks not to join the anti-war movement because the problems they face are "so vast and crushing that they have little time or energy to focus upon international crises." Though himself a pacifist and Conscientious Objector, Rustin later tells Afro-Americans to join the military "to learn a trade, earn a salary, and be in a position to enter the job market on their return." And he opposes immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops because doing so would result in a totalitarian regime ruling Vietnam.
Some Black leaders do support King. CORE leader Floyd McKissick who has been fearlessly condemning the war says, "I'm glad to have [King] with us, no question about that." Dr. Benjamin Mays, King's teacher from Morehouse College in Atlanta calls King, "One of the most courageous men alive today." He defends the speech in terms of Gandhian nonviolence. Others also defend King, and his stand intensifies the Vietnam debates already roiling Afro-American communities across the nation. Sam Washington of the Chicago Defender describes how many Blacks in that city see in King, "a good example to follow," and he observes that while opposition to the war is not yet widespread, Blacks are beginning to move "over to King's side" rather than that of the NAACP and the Urban League.
While King expected attacks from the administration and political conservatives, those from liberals whom he had hoped would be allies trouble him. SCLC leader Dorothy Cotton later commented, "My sense is that Martin was very much pained by the criticism. He really took notice of what people were saying. My very clear impression is that the criticism made him delve even deeper into the way of nonviolence." Rev. Andrew Young later recalled, "Martin was almost reduced to tears by the stridency of the criticism directed against him. [The Post and Times editorials] hurt him the most because they challenged his very right to take a position."
For Vincent Harding, who drafted major portions of Beyond Vietnam, the attacks were a form of racial paternalism, because in essence they were saying:
Martin Luther King, you have forgotten who you are, and who we are. You should be very, very happy that we have allowed you to talk critically about race relations in this country. You should be very happy that we've allowed you to talk about Negro things. But MLK, when it comes to the foreign policy of this country, you are not qualified to speak to these issues. These are our issues. Our white establishment [is] in charge of such things, and you are absolutely out of your place to enter into this kind of arena.
As for Dr. King himself, though discouraged by the fierce condemnation hurled at him from former friends and allies, he is buoyant at having finally declared his full opposition to both the Vietnam War and the destructive values inherent in U.S. foreign policy. Eleven days later, on April 15th, he participates in the Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, a mass march from Central Park to the United Nations where he delivers an address to the marchers with the call and refrain of Stop the Bombing! The police claim there are 125,000 marchers; protest organizers place the total at 400,000. By either estimate it is the largest anti-war protest in American history up to that point. In later months and years, even larger ones take place.
Dr. King's Beyond Vietnam speech marks a significant advance in the growing anti-war movement. His eloquent statement and his prestige as a moral leader and Nobel Prize winner bring his condemnation of U.S. foreign policy to people and communities who have not been reached by student protesters. Afro- Americans, even those who reject nonviolence and integration, honor him as a courageous leader who puts himself on the line for freedom and justice, and his principled stand against the Vietnam War resonates in a community that has already begun to question the war.
Public opinion, however, shifts slowly — but shift it does. One year later, in the last poll taken before Dr. King is assassinated, public support for the war has dropped to 40%. Three years earlier, in the Spring of 1965, it had been over 60%. And over the same period, opposition to the war has grown from a little over 20% in 1965 to almost 50% in 1968. Yet almost 75% of all Americans, and 55% of Black Americans, still feel that as a civil rights leader Dr. King should not be involving himself or using his prestige in opposing the war (Aftermath 3-6).
During a recent speech at the National Press Club, King’s youngest daughter, Bernice, noted that once her father started speaking out against the war in Vietnam he became a threat.
“The reason why my father was assassinated was because he had such a love for humanity,” [Bernice] King told the crowd. “It was not because he was talking about black and white together. He was assassinated because once he spoke out against the war in Vietnam, he started talking about how we were distributing our wealth to fight what he felt was an unjust war” (Joiner 1).
What made King truly radical was his desire to act on this empathy for people not like himself, neither black nor American. For him, there was “no meaningful solution” to the war without taking into account Vietnamese people, who were “the voiceless ones.” Recognizing their suffering from far away, King connected it with the intimate suffering of African Americans at home. The African-American struggle to liberate black people found a corollary in the struggle of Vietnamese people against foreign domination. It was therefore a bitter irony that African Americans might be used to suppress the freedom of others, to participate in, as King put it, “the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.”
Americans prefer to see our wars as exercises in protecting and expanding freedom and democracy. To suggest that we might be fighting for capitalism is too disturbing for many Americans. But King said “that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we … must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin … the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.” Those words, and their threat to the powerful, still apply today. … (Nguyen 5).
It is a truism of nonviolent resistance that the people most profoundly affected by any act of political defiance are the protesters themselves. Whatever its effect on the civil rights and anti-war movements, A Time to Break Silence liberates Dr. King spiritually and politically. Ten days after Riverside, he begins a series of speeches on the theme of The Other America, speeches about race, poverty, economic injustice, and political inequality that directly challenge establishment economic policy and American "business as usual." He continues to speak out against the Vietnam War, and he begins planning and building an inter-racial movement of the poor to demand a fundamental reordering of American economic policies and practices (Aftermath 7).
King began plotting what he called the Poor People’s Campaign, an initiative to unite all of America’s dispossessed, regardless of their race or nationality. The Riverside speech seemed to unlock something in him, and he would no longer concern himself with political allegiance or popular opinion.
“The cross may mean the death of your popularity,” he said at a conference the following month. Even so, he added, “take up your cross and just bear it. And that’s the way I have decided to go. Come what may, it doesn’t matter now” (Hedin 7).
Yet the moral imperatives and political issues Dr. King raises in “Beyond Vietnam” still resonate today in the 21st Century:
When you read the speech, if you replace the word "Vietnam," every time it pops up, with the words "Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan," you will be — it will blow your mind at how King, were he alive today at 81, could really stand up and give that same speech and just replace, again, "Vietnam" with "Iraq" and "Afghanistan". — Tavis Smiley, NPR (Aftermath 7).
… liberal policies only proved, rather than dispelled, King’s arguments. Liberals who had previously supported the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the mid-1960s became the same people supporting laws, such as the Safe Streets Act in 1968, that began the militarization of municipal police forces and put more money into building up the law enforcement and criminal justice apparatuses than had ever been allocated toward Lyndon Johnson’s anti-poverty programs.
In the fifty years since, the U. S. has entered into new war fronts across the world. And the Democrats have often stood in lockstep with the Republicans in supporting increasing funding for the military industrial complex, even as the wars extended to the home front in the forms of “wars” on drugs, crime, and the poor. Increasing funding for military intervention overseas has occurred almost without fail, while attacks on the social safety nets of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other programs have only ramped up over the last fifty years — mostly from Republicans — and are only getting stronger every year.
Decreasing or eliminating funding to anti-poverty programs, while simultaneously increasing defense spending and allowing tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the top one percent of wealth holders is antithetical to the kind of society Martin Luther King, Jr. was working to create. It smacks of the same double-burden he described poor Americans facing back in 1967. And in light of President Donald Trump’s comments regarding immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America, in which he disparaged in racist terms those seeking to escape violence and persecution by coming to the United States, King would say we still have more maturing to do (Burrell 5-6).
Works cited:
“Aftermath.” Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. Dr. King and the Vietnam War. Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline 1967. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis67.h...
Burrell, Kristopher. “To Build a Mature Society: The Lasting Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ‘Beyond Vietnam’ Speech.” The Gotham Center for New York History. November 15, 2018. Web. https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/to-...
Hedin, Benjamin. “Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s Searing Antiwar Speech, Fifty Years Later.” The New Yorker. April 3, 2017. Web. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cul...
Joiner, Lottie. “King’s Vietnam Speech Still Holds True 50 Years Later.” The Undefeated. April 4, 2017. Web. https://theundefeated.com/features/ma...
Krieg, Gregory. “When MLK Turned on Vietnam, Even Liberal 'Allies' Turned on Him.” CNN Politics. April 4, 2018. Web. https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/04/politi...
Nguyen, Viet Thanh. “The MLK Speech We Need Today Is Not the One We Remember Most.” Time. January 17, 2019. Web. https://time.com/5505453/martin-luthe...
Suggs, Ernie. “Honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” AJC: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Web. http://honoringmlk.com/
“I felt lifted up,” John Lewis said. “I thought he would become much more aggressive in trying to get our country and people in high places in our government to put the issue of poverty and hunger back on the American agenda” (Hedin 7). I came away from that evening inspired. I still believed, in the face of so much that seemed to be falling apart, that slowly, inexorably, in ways I might not be able to recognize or figure out, we were continuing to move in the direction we should, toward something better. I wasn't in the midst of the movement anymore, not at the moment, but I knew I would get back to it.
President Johnson, leaders of both parties, and most of the political establishment react with predictable fury and condemnation, not just at Dr. King's opposition to the war but even more so to his placing the war in a broader context of colonialism that directly challenges the anti-Communist premise of Cold War foreign policy (Aftermath 1).
… Johnson rescinded an invitation to the White House and authorized the FBI to increase its surveillance campaign to discredit and destroy him. Other civil rights leaders spurned him. Even the NAACP issued a statement disavowing King’s sentiments (Burrell 4).
One White House advisor tells the president that King, "who is inordinately ambitious and quite stupid," has "thrown in with the commies," because he's "in desperate search of a constituency." FBI Director Hoover tells the president that "Based on King's recent activities and public utterances, it is clear that he is an instrument in the hands of subversive forces seeking to undermine our nation." Carl Rowan, head of the U.S. Information Agency and one of the highest-ranking Afro-Americans in the Executive branch, publishes a red-baiting article in Reader's Digest — the most widely-read magazine in the nation — calling King an egomaniac under the sway of Communist agents (Aftermath 1).
Ralph Bunche, who was the first African-American to win a Nobel Peace Prize, said King “ought not be both a civil rights leader and an anti-war spokesman” and should give up one role or the other (Suggs 1).
By one count, some 168 major newspapers condemned the speech. …
"He has diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country and to his people," The Washington Post declared (Krieg 5). “King has done a grave injury to those who are his natural allies…and… an even graver injury to himself” (Suggs 2). The Post called King’s recommendations “sheer inventions of unsupported fantasy” and opined that, “many who have listened to him with respect will never again accord him the same confidence” (Burrell 1).
The New York Times, too, published a damning assessment, titled "Dr. King's Error," arguing that it was "both wasteful and self-defeating" to link Vietnam with domestic inequity and unrest.
"Dr. King," the piece resolved, "makes too facile a connection between the speeding up of the war in Vietnam and the slowing down of the war against poverty" (Krieg 5).
“There are no simple or easy answers to the war in Vietnam or to racial injustice in this country… Linking these hard, complex problems will lead not to solutions but to deeper confusion” (Hedin 6).
The San Antonio Express ruled that King, "gripped" by some "strange logic," was "tragically wrong in his viewpoint."
"If King and his group really want to help themselves," it continued, "they can show a spirit of support now lacking that will make the impression in Hanoi that America is not greatly divided in its determination to honor the commitment in Vietnam."
Others were less measured in their language. Life magazine described the speech as "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi," while James Marlow, in his analysis for The Associated Press, suggested King's drawing together Vietnam and civil rights was a cynical attempt to reclaim the "limelight."
"Some Negro leaders publicly disagreed with these latest tactics of King," he wrote. "Since he needs all the white and Negro support he can get to start the civil rights movement rolling again, it's hard to see how he did it anything but injury."
"Martin Luther King Crosses the Line," The Cincinnati Enquirer blared, calling his words "arrant nonsense."
The "unctuous" King "has been something of a hindrance to the civil rights movement since he was awarded the Nobel Peace prize," they wrote. "Since the award, he has specialized in speaking in Olympian tones, rather than addressing himself to the practicalities of the civil rights movement" (Krieg 6-7).
Fearing to appear unpatriotic in a time of war, much of the Black press echoes the criticisms of white media. The Pittsburgh Courier says King is "tragically misleading American Negroes," on issues that are, "too complex for simple debate." The New York Amsterdam News urges Afro-Americans to "rally around the country" and support President Johnson (Aftermath 2).
Articulating the opinion of conservative Republicans, LIFE magazine describes the speech as:
"A demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi. ... [King] goes beyond his personal right to dissent, ... when he connects progress in civil rights here with a proposal that amounts to abject surrender in Vietnam ... King comes close to betraying the cause for which he has worked so long."
…
Committed to the Democratic Party and its Cold War liberalism, NAACP and Urban League leaders rush to reaffirm — once again — that they do not stand with Dr. King. The NAACP Board of Directors adopts a resolution labeling any attempt to merge the civil rights and peace movements, "A serious tactical mistake." Former NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall who is now LBJ's Solicitor General and soon to be Supreme Court appointee, acknowledges King's right to dissent on foreign policy, but "not as a civil rights leader." During a personal encounter, Whitney Young of the Urban League accuses King of abandoning the poor for the antiwar movement. King retorts, "Whitney, what you're saying may get you a foundation grant, but it won't get you into the Kingdom of Truth" (Aftermath 2)
A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin refused to talk about it [the speech] in the press. Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young distanced themselves from him. Black media that had chronicled his every step since the Montgomery Bus Boycott a decade earlier railed against him … (Suggs 2).
All of these denunciations show that the liberal civil rights establishment, which included the Democratic Party, many media outlets, and civil rights organizations, were only comfortable with the King that spoke of dreams and racial progress, and allowed liberals to remain secure in their condescension toward the South, without having to examine their own assumptions or the policies they had crafted. The liberal establishment did not want to hear a black public intellectual who was not talking about the foibles of black people or how much progress black people had made. And civil rights organizations did not want to endanger relationships with the federal government or white philanthropic organizations that provided much of their operating funds (Burrell 4).
For Dr. King, the most surprising — and disheartening — rebuke comes from his long-time friend, ally, and co-worker Bayard Rustin who defends King's "right to debate" the war but tells Blacks not to join the anti-war movement because the problems they face are "so vast and crushing that they have little time or energy to focus upon international crises." Though himself a pacifist and Conscientious Objector, Rustin later tells Afro-Americans to join the military "to learn a trade, earn a salary, and be in a position to enter the job market on their return." And he opposes immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops because doing so would result in a totalitarian regime ruling Vietnam.
Some Black leaders do support King. CORE leader Floyd McKissick who has been fearlessly condemning the war says, "I'm glad to have [King] with us, no question about that." Dr. Benjamin Mays, King's teacher from Morehouse College in Atlanta calls King, "One of the most courageous men alive today." He defends the speech in terms of Gandhian nonviolence. Others also defend King, and his stand intensifies the Vietnam debates already roiling Afro-American communities across the nation. Sam Washington of the Chicago Defender describes how many Blacks in that city see in King, "a good example to follow," and he observes that while opposition to the war is not yet widespread, Blacks are beginning to move "over to King's side" rather than that of the NAACP and the Urban League.
While King expected attacks from the administration and political conservatives, those from liberals whom he had hoped would be allies trouble him. SCLC leader Dorothy Cotton later commented, "My sense is that Martin was very much pained by the criticism. He really took notice of what people were saying. My very clear impression is that the criticism made him delve even deeper into the way of nonviolence." Rev. Andrew Young later recalled, "Martin was almost reduced to tears by the stridency of the criticism directed against him. [The Post and Times editorials] hurt him the most because they challenged his very right to take a position."
For Vincent Harding, who drafted major portions of Beyond Vietnam, the attacks were a form of racial paternalism, because in essence they were saying:
Martin Luther King, you have forgotten who you are, and who we are. You should be very, very happy that we have allowed you to talk critically about race relations in this country. You should be very happy that we've allowed you to talk about Negro things. But MLK, when it comes to the foreign policy of this country, you are not qualified to speak to these issues. These are our issues. Our white establishment [is] in charge of such things, and you are absolutely out of your place to enter into this kind of arena.
As for Dr. King himself, though discouraged by the fierce condemnation hurled at him from former friends and allies, he is buoyant at having finally declared his full opposition to both the Vietnam War and the destructive values inherent in U.S. foreign policy. Eleven days later, on April 15th, he participates in the Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, a mass march from Central Park to the United Nations where he delivers an address to the marchers with the call and refrain of Stop the Bombing! The police claim there are 125,000 marchers; protest organizers place the total at 400,000. By either estimate it is the largest anti-war protest in American history up to that point. In later months and years, even larger ones take place.
Dr. King's Beyond Vietnam speech marks a significant advance in the growing anti-war movement. His eloquent statement and his prestige as a moral leader and Nobel Prize winner bring his condemnation of U.S. foreign policy to people and communities who have not been reached by student protesters. Afro- Americans, even those who reject nonviolence and integration, honor him as a courageous leader who puts himself on the line for freedom and justice, and his principled stand against the Vietnam War resonates in a community that has already begun to question the war.
Public opinion, however, shifts slowly — but shift it does. One year later, in the last poll taken before Dr. King is assassinated, public support for the war has dropped to 40%. Three years earlier, in the Spring of 1965, it had been over 60%. And over the same period, opposition to the war has grown from a little over 20% in 1965 to almost 50% in 1968. Yet almost 75% of all Americans, and 55% of Black Americans, still feel that as a civil rights leader Dr. King should not be involving himself or using his prestige in opposing the war (Aftermath 3-6).
During a recent speech at the National Press Club, King’s youngest daughter, Bernice, noted that once her father started speaking out against the war in Vietnam he became a threat.
“The reason why my father was assassinated was because he had such a love for humanity,” [Bernice] King told the crowd. “It was not because he was talking about black and white together. He was assassinated because once he spoke out against the war in Vietnam, he started talking about how we were distributing our wealth to fight what he felt was an unjust war” (Joiner 1).
What made King truly radical was his desire to act on this empathy for people not like himself, neither black nor American. For him, there was “no meaningful solution” to the war without taking into account Vietnamese people, who were “the voiceless ones.” Recognizing their suffering from far away, King connected it with the intimate suffering of African Americans at home. The African-American struggle to liberate black people found a corollary in the struggle of Vietnamese people against foreign domination. It was therefore a bitter irony that African Americans might be used to suppress the freedom of others, to participate in, as King put it, “the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.”
Americans prefer to see our wars as exercises in protecting and expanding freedom and democracy. To suggest that we might be fighting for capitalism is too disturbing for many Americans. But King said “that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we … must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin … the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.” Those words, and their threat to the powerful, still apply today. … (Nguyen 5).
It is a truism of nonviolent resistance that the people most profoundly affected by any act of political defiance are the protesters themselves. Whatever its effect on the civil rights and anti-war movements, A Time to Break Silence liberates Dr. King spiritually and politically. Ten days after Riverside, he begins a series of speeches on the theme of The Other America, speeches about race, poverty, economic injustice, and political inequality that directly challenge establishment economic policy and American "business as usual." He continues to speak out against the Vietnam War, and he begins planning and building an inter-racial movement of the poor to demand a fundamental reordering of American economic policies and practices (Aftermath 7).
King began plotting what he called the Poor People’s Campaign, an initiative to unite all of America’s dispossessed, regardless of their race or nationality. The Riverside speech seemed to unlock something in him, and he would no longer concern himself with political allegiance or popular opinion.
“The cross may mean the death of your popularity,” he said at a conference the following month. Even so, he added, “take up your cross and just bear it. And that’s the way I have decided to go. Come what may, it doesn’t matter now” (Hedin 7).
Yet the moral imperatives and political issues Dr. King raises in “Beyond Vietnam” still resonate today in the 21st Century:
When you read the speech, if you replace the word "Vietnam," every time it pops up, with the words "Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan," you will be — it will blow your mind at how King, were he alive today at 81, could really stand up and give that same speech and just replace, again, "Vietnam" with "Iraq" and "Afghanistan". — Tavis Smiley, NPR (Aftermath 7).
… liberal policies only proved, rather than dispelled, King’s arguments. Liberals who had previously supported the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the mid-1960s became the same people supporting laws, such as the Safe Streets Act in 1968, that began the militarization of municipal police forces and put more money into building up the law enforcement and criminal justice apparatuses than had ever been allocated toward Lyndon Johnson’s anti-poverty programs.
In the fifty years since, the U. S. has entered into new war fronts across the world. And the Democrats have often stood in lockstep with the Republicans in supporting increasing funding for the military industrial complex, even as the wars extended to the home front in the forms of “wars” on drugs, crime, and the poor. Increasing funding for military intervention overseas has occurred almost without fail, while attacks on the social safety nets of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other programs have only ramped up over the last fifty years — mostly from Republicans — and are only getting stronger every year.
Decreasing or eliminating funding to anti-poverty programs, while simultaneously increasing defense spending and allowing tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the top one percent of wealth holders is antithetical to the kind of society Martin Luther King, Jr. was working to create. It smacks of the same double-burden he described poor Americans facing back in 1967. And in light of President Donald Trump’s comments regarding immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America, in which he disparaged in racist terms those seeking to escape violence and persecution by coming to the United States, King would say we still have more maturing to do (Burrell 5-6).
Works cited:
“Aftermath.” Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. Dr. King and the Vietnam War. Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline 1967. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis67.h...
Burrell, Kristopher. “To Build a Mature Society: The Lasting Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ‘Beyond Vietnam’ Speech.” The Gotham Center for New York History. November 15, 2018. Web. https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/to-...
Hedin, Benjamin. “Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s Searing Antiwar Speech, Fifty Years Later.” The New Yorker. April 3, 2017. Web. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cul...
Joiner, Lottie. “King’s Vietnam Speech Still Holds True 50 Years Later.” The Undefeated. April 4, 2017. Web. https://theundefeated.com/features/ma...
Krieg, Gregory. “When MLK Turned on Vietnam, Even Liberal 'Allies' Turned on Him.” CNN Politics. April 4, 2018. Web. https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/04/politi...
Nguyen, Viet Thanh. “The MLK Speech We Need Today Is Not the One We Remember Most.” Time. January 17, 2019. Web. https://time.com/5505453/martin-luthe...
Suggs, Ernie. “Honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” AJC: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Web. http://honoringmlk.com/
