March on Washington 89opponents ‘an excuse to be against us. I didn’t want to give any of them a
chance to say, “Yes, I’m for the [civil rights] bill, but I’m damned if I will vote
for it at the point of a gun.” ’ Randolph responded in a booming bass voice
that no one could stop the march because blacks were ‘already in the streets.’
Recognizing the march’s inevitability, the president endorsed it a month later.
Privately, the administration pressured organizers to make drastic changes.
‘Well, if we can’t stop it, we’ll run the damn thing,’ Kennedy told his advisers.
The rally date was set for a Wednesday to prevent weekend mischief. The
site was switched from the Capitol building to the Lincoln Memorial on the
Washington Mall in order to cordon off the demonstrators on three sides
by water. The organizers were to recruit as many whites as possible from
churches and labor unions and to ensure that all demonstrators dressed con-
servatively. Special trains and buses would drop off marchers in the morning
and depart before sunset. Printed programs would tell them where to go,
how to behave, and the sequence of events. The ‘march’ would consist of a
short walk from the Washington Monument and end with speeches, not the
embarrassing sit-ins that SNCC had proposed. Should the speakers become
too inflammatory, the administration would station an aide beneath the plat-
form to play a phonograph record of Mahalia Jackson singing ‘He’s Got the
Whole World in His Hands’ over the loudspeaker. From John Lewis’s
perspective, the Kennedy administration was so determined to cool off the
movement that the march was becoming ‘a march in, not onWashington.’
Without knowing how many people would come, Bayard Rustin faced
enormous logistical problems that had to be overcome in sixty days. He
arranged for hundreds of volunteer marshals to ensure order and stationed
white policemen on the periphery so that white extremists would not be arrested
by black officers. With the help of Howard University students, Rustin installed
dozens of drinking fountains and portable toilets on the Mall. Emergency
medical personnel staffed first-aid stations. Bus drivers kept aspirins, suntan
oil, Band-Aids, and salt tablets on hand for minor emergencies. Thousands
of blankets were available for marchers who arrived in the pre-dawn hours.
Volunteers at New York City’s Riverside Church worked around-the-clock to
make 80,000 cheese sandwiches to be sent overnight to the march. Because
this would be the first time that America would witness a black-organized
event of such magnitude, Rustin was determined that there be no hitches.
As the march gathered momentum, Rustin and King pulled together a
microcosm of the ‘Beloved Community,’ a coalition of blacks, white intellec-
tuals, union leaders, Christians and Jews, social justice radicals from the
1930s, and folk musicians led by Pete Seeger. A hundred civil, labor, and
religious organizations climbed aboard, including the ACLU, International
Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, and Archdiocese of Washington, DC.
These groups helped underwrite the march’s cost of $120,000.