Anniversary of the March on Washington That Almost Was

Fifty Years after the August 28, 1963, March on Washington

by Walter C. Uhler

Nearly a month ago tens of thousands of Americans publicly celebrated the 50th anniversary of the August 28, 1963, “March on Washington.” President Obama addressed the gathering, as did former Presidents Carter and Clinton. Conspicuously absent from the celebration were the leaders of the Republican Party.

The celebration will continue on September 25, 2013, when the 92nd Street Y in New York will host a discussion of the march by four of its participants: Harry Belafonte, John Lewis Clarence Jones and Julian Bond.

A timely book informs this celebration, The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights, written by Professor William P. Jones, who teaches history at the University of Wisconsin. Published by W.W. Norton & Company, the book provides the reader with a detailed account of the events that eventually provoked more than 200,000 Americans to march on Washington in August of 1963.

The initial inspiration for the 1963 march was a call, made by union leader A. Philip Randolph in January 1941, for America’s Negroes to march on Washington to protest the failure of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to “stop racial discrimination in the armed forces and by defense contractors.” (p. 1)

Discrimination in national defense hiring was no small matter, given that F.D.R. already had taken steps to build a great Arsenal of Democracy to help European and Asian allies in their fight against fascism. In the summer of 1940 F.D.R. ordered the U.S. government to spend billions of dollars on the construction of military bases, on the retooling of factories and on the improvement of infrastructure that moved raw materials and finished products. (p.25) Yet, “a survey of employment patterns in twenty defense industries showed that black workers got only 5.4 percent of the jobs created that year and that this figure fell to only 2.5 percent a year later.” (p. 26)

Initially, F.D.R. dismissed the prospect of a march, even after Mr. Randolph threatened to bring “ten to fifty thousand negroes” to the city. But, as the July 1, 1941, date for the march drew nearer, F.D.R’s “White House went into a panic.” (p. 38).

Thus, on June 25, 1941, Roosevelt issued an executive order largely aimed at reducing racial discrimination in the defense industry through the institution of a Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), chaired by five officials appointed by the President. (pp. 38-39) It was enough to persuade Randolph to cancel the march.

Nevertheless, “by the summer of 1942, it was clear that Roosevelt’s executive order was being implemented only in places where black activists could force local officials into addressing discrimination.” (p.50)

Worse, an FEPC investigation of hiring and promotion practices at the Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding Company in Mobile led to a riot by thousands of men and women on May 24, 1943 after the company agreed to upgrade twelve black men into skilled welding jobs. (p. 63) A week later, in Detroit, “25,000 white workers walked out of the Packard Motor Car Company because three black workers had been upgraded into skilled positions…” (p.66)

According to Professor Jones, the riots effectively killed Mr. Randolph’s March on Washington Movement and forced him to create a new grass roots organization devoted to establishing a permanent FEPC. However, when conservatives in Congress filibustered and then killed the bill calling for a permanent FEPC, Randolph reorganized yet again while attaching himself to what eventually became the Leadership Council on Civil Rights.

The driving force behind the Leadership Council on Civil Rights was Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP. Like the NAACP, the Council focused on elite leadership, lobbying and litigation rather than grassroots activity and protest.

“Wilkin’s approach won a stunning victory on May 17, 1954, when the Supreme Court accepted the NAACP’s argument in the case of Brown v. Board of Education and ruled that segregation of public schools was, in fact, unconstitutional.” (p.81) But a subsequent court ruling that allowed the states “all deliberate speed” in implementing desegregation “set the stage for a series of confrontations between supporters and opponents of Jim Crow in communities across the South.” (Ibid)

The racists responded to the Brown decision by forming ignoble Citizens’ Councils, which pressured “local businessmen to deny jobs and credit to anyone – black or white – who dared to criticize segregation.” (p.87) Racists also passed laws or used court injunctions to ban the NAACP from operating in the South. “Ironically,” notes Professor Jones, “the backlash against the NAACP facilitated the emergence of grassroots movements that would ultimately succeed in implementing the Brown decision.” (p.82)

Many of those grassroots movements were inspired by the non-violent movement in Montgomery, Alabama, which organized a successful and historic boycott of the city’s buses in late 1955, after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to vacate her seat for a white person.

The success of the one-day bus boycott led to its continuation, which provoked terrorist bomb attacks by white racists and the subsequent arrest of the non-violent movement’s leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Both provocations became front-page news across the nation and the world.

After the Supreme Court ordered the integration of Montgomery’s buses, ugly (and presumably “Christian”) southern white folk responded with shotgun blasts, bomb blasts and sniper fire, as well as the arrest of 21 protesters as they attempted to desegregate the city’s buses. In response, 100 black ministers, educators, labor leaders, and business owners met at a “Southern Leadership Conference on Transportation and Nonviolent Integration,” led by Dr. King and held at his father’s church in Atlanta on January 10, 1957. Subsequently renamed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), it worked “to strengthen ties among the various local movements that had developed in the South during the previous year.” (p 112)

For example, one SCLC founder, Edward Edmonds, “revitalized an NAACP youth group in Greensboro, North Carolina, by leading protests to demand integration of public schools and swimming pools during the summer of 1959.” Members of that group conducted a “sit-in” at a lunch counter in Greensboro on February 1, 1960. (p.118) The youth movement spread to more than 100 other southern cities by April and became the basis for the organization known as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

In the midst of the Montgomery bus boycott, A. Philip Randolph “sought to solidify support for the nonviolent movement among civil rights and labor activists in the North.” In February 1956, he announced the formation of “In Friendship,” and in May he “announced that George Meany, Walter Reuther, and other labor leaders had pledged $2 million to a ‘war chest’ aimed at supporting the boycott in Montgomery, the NAACP’s legal team, and the black sharecroppers who faced eviction for their attempts to vote in the South.” (p.109)

Although Randolph held a leadership position in the American Federation of Labor, his relationship with the newly merged AFL-CIO began to deteriorate as soon as he pressed for the end of employment discrimination within these parent organizations. On September 23, 1959, at the AFL-CIO convention in San Francisco, “Randolph introduced two resolutions, one calling for the expulsion of any unions that did not drop bans on nonwhite members within six months and the other ordering the ‘liquidation and elimination’ of any segregated locals in unions affiliated with the AFL-CIO.” (p. 130)

When these resolutions were rejected, Randolph undertook the task of building a national organization of black trade unionists. Thus, he gathered some 1,500 men and women to attend the founding convention of the Negro American Labor Council (NALC) on May 28, 1960. (p. 132)

Like the SCLC, NALC “was a network of leaders rather than a mass organization like the NAACP or a union…but it was composed of staff and elected officials from local unions and civil rights groups who wielded tremendous influence in their communities.” (pp. 142-43) “By 1962 NALC chapters were operating in twenty-three cities.” (p. 152) Nevertheless, NALC made no progress in securing the elimination of Jim Crow unions within the AFL-CIO.

According to Professor Jones, frustrations within NALC prompted Randolph to call for a march on Washington. He asked his friend, Bayard Rustin, to “prepare a proposal that could win support from civil rights and labor leaders for a ‘mass descent’ on the nation’s capital.” The objective of the march would be to draw attention to “the economic subordination of the Negro,” to create “more jobs for all Americans,” and to push for a “broad and fundamental program for economic justice.” (p.161)

(However, “frustrations within NALC” does not satisfactorily explain the impetus for a march on Washington. Other factors contributed, including “the events in Birmingham, Ala., in early May – the police beatings, the snapping dogs, the fire hoses turned on people – that galvanized the movement.” [David Brooks, “The Ideas Behind the March,” New York Times, Aug. 27, 2013])

Concerned that Randolph’s focus on jobs might come at the expense of King’s civil rights movement in the South, Anna Arnold Hedgeman, a leader in the black women’s movement, arranged a meeting between the two, which resulted in an agreement to march under the slogan, “For Jobs and Freedom.” They soon gained the support of John Lewis, chairman of SNCC, and James Farmer of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality).

(Both the AFL-CIO and Malcolm X refused to participate.)

Although newspaper reporters expressed concern about possible violence and six thousand police, firefighters and soldiers were assigned crowd control duties, militant non-violence ruled the day on August 28, 1963. (p. 176)

A. Philip Randolph, Floyd McKissick (reading a letter from James Farmer), John Lewis, Whitney Young and Roy Wilkins were among the “militants” who issued specific complaints and made demands upon their fellow Americans and the U.S. Government.

Roy Wilkins, for example, “leveled a scathing attack at the White House, asking how it was possible that that the United States government could not protect civil rights activists from being ‘beaten and kicked and maltreated and shot and killed by local and state enforcement officers.” (pp.195-96)

The last speech of the day was by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. According to Professor Jones, King’s powerful “I Have a Dream” speech “was the least representative or attentive to the specific goals and demands of the mobilization.” (p. 196) Yet, fifty years later, it is Dr. King’s beautiful vision that is remembered, not the many specific goals and demands articulated by the militants.

Nevertheless, the March on Washington was an “unmitigated success.” (p. 201) It influenced President Lyndon B. Johnson’s decision to announce a War on Poverty and its pressure helped to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Moreover, as Professor Jones noted in an OP-ED in the New York Times, “The message of the march still resonated in 1965, when Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid, key features of … Johnson’s proposal to bring ‘an end to poverty and racial injustice.’” [NYT, Aug. 28, 2013]

Paradoxically, the attention paid by Professor Jones to A. Philip Randolph and his efforts to obtain jobs for African-Americans caused him to overlook the significantly negative impact that civil rights protests had on prospective jobs for southern whites. To cite just one example, the bloody campus riot at the University of Mississippi on the eve of James Meredith’s registration (in the fall of 1962) prompted an executive of Work Wear of Cleveland, Ohio, to tell a developer in Mississippi that “his firm would not ‘consider expanding in Mississippi again until the state and people join the Union again.’” [James C. Cobb, The South and America Since World War II, p. 103]

Precisely because so many northern business leaders (and tourists) refused to expand their businesses (or their travel) into the South, due to white racial violence, “in city after city civil rights leaders learned quickly that the weak spot in Jim Crow’s armor could usually be found in the vicinity of his pocketbook. ” [Cobb, p. 101]

Thus, thanks to the civil rights movement and, secondarily, to decisions by moderate southern white businessmen to subordinate their racial biases to their economic well-being, the worst excesses of overt white racial violence and racist rhetoric have diminished significantly over the past 50 years. Unfortunately, racism has not gone away. It has become less overt and most of it is known as symbolic racism.

According to Professors Nicholas A. Valentino and David O. Sears – in their article, “Old Times There Are Not Forgotten: Race and the Partisan Realignment in the Contemporary South (American Journal of Political Science Vol. 49, No. 3, July 2005) — symbolic racism consists of four complementary beliefs: (1) Blacks no longer suffer from racial discrimination, (2) their continuing disadvantage is due to a lack of a work ethic, (3) blacks make excessive demands and (4) receive too many undeserved advantages. [p. 674]

As I’ve written elsewhere, “people who believe that discrimination is no longer an obstacle for blacks are obviously symbolic racists, because they rely on their own sentiments about blacks, rather than ‘numerous audit studies [that] have documented the persistence of antiblack discrimination in markets for real estate, credit, jobs, goods, and services.’ [Douglas S. Massey, “The Past & Future of American Civil Rights,” Daedalus, Spring 2011, p. 49])”

Nevertheless, Lee Atwater famously revealed how Republicans manipulate these prejudices: “You start out in 1954 by saying ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.” [Bob Herbert, "Impossible, Ridiculous, Repugnant," New York Times, Oct. 6, 2005]

But, with the election of President Barack Obama, white Republicans began to fear that these “abstract” issues might be turned against them, in order to undermine long-standing white privilege. Thus they formed the Tea Party and became symbolic racists in staggering numbers. (See http://www.walter-c-uhler.com/?p=666 )

Yesterday, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Richard Como, the superintendent of the Coatesville Area School District and Jim Donato, its athletic director, were forced to resign after it became known that they had exchanged lewd, sexist and racist text messages about staff and students on school-issued cellphones. The texts were “rife with the ‘n-word.’”

My own interactions with white Americans, as a white American, tell me that the covert racism uncovered in Coatesville – the racism “shared” among friends and family members, but never expressed in public – still fills the hateful hearts of some 50 percent of our white population, notwithstanding the March on Washington and the diminution of overt racism in America.