10 MARCH ON WASHINGTON
T
o win congressional approval of Kennedy’s civil rights bill, Martin
Luther King told aides gravely, ‘We are on a breakthrough. We need a
mass protest.’ The idea of a huge rally in Washington had been
advanced by A. Philip Randolph in 1941, and King contacted the ‘grand old
man’ of the movement, to see if all parties could work together. Randolph
was glad to cooperate though his focus was different. Black unemployment,
he noted, was more than twice the rate for whites, and a typical black family
earned about half what an average white family did. Worse, this racial divide
in income was widening. America was still one country for whites and
another for blacks. Working with Bayard Rustin, the movement’s most
talented organizer, Randolph suggested that a national gesture for economic
reform could prod politicians to double the minimum wage and create a
large federal job program. By transforming the civil rights struggle from a
regional to a national campaign, the massive demonstration would be the
movement’s high-water mark.
Other civil rights leaders had reservations about the plan. Roy Wilkins of
the influential NAACP opposed a march as too expensive and too ineffectual
in influencing legislation. He intimated that any such march would be tainted
by Rustin’s homosexuality, imprisonment for resisting the draft for the Korean
war, and former membership in the Young Communist League. Wilkins over-
looked Rustin’s twenty-two arrests for human rights, his co-founding of CORE
and SCLC, and his international organizing experience. Without the NAACP’s
money and affiliates, the march might well be doomed. The Urban League’s
Whitney Youngworried that his organization’s tax-exempt status would be
jeopardized by backing a political event. For SNCC’s John Lewis, a march
was just the beginning. To challenge a foot-dragging government, he pro-
posed paralyzing Washington with camp-ins on the White House lawn, lie-ins
across airport runways, and sit-ins in Congress and the Justice department.
These reservations forced a compromise. All major civil rights leaders,
including Wilkins, signed on, provided the purpose was changed to ‘JobsYoung, Whitney(1921–
71): Urban League exec-
utive secretary who was
nicknamed the move-
ment’s ‘chairman of the
board’ for his mediating
skills.March on Washington:
This demonstration for
black jobs and freedom
on 28 August 1963 was
the largest yet in US
history.