Monday is the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. It was commemorated Saturday with another march and speeches in front of the reflecting pool. It's been duly noted in some of the media.
On Friday, the Hill website had a story related to the 1963 march, with a photo that showed demonstrators near the reflecting pool, but it was not of that march. The signs were different--those in 1963 had a uniform style, having been printed in union shops. Unions were big backers of that march. And as an indication of how long ago that march was, the attire of the demonstrators was different in this photo--the casual clothes we're used to now. In 1963 the women wore dresses and the men wore suits and ties, though jackets did come off in that hot sun. I know these things not just from period photos, but because I was there.
The Guardian story was interesting in adding big picture information I didn't fully know--particularly the active participation of the President John F. Kennedy Administration in making the march a success, and partly through union leadership, encouraging white participation. Attorney General Robert Kennedy worked closely with march organizers, and even brought black police officers down from New York because at the time there were no Black police in Washington. The Kennedys also helped with the sound system, calling on their campaign expert. (Even so, it wasn't great.)
The story also quoted some participants' recollections today, and I was pleased to see they remembered how extraordinary the day felt, as I did. It's my strongest lasting impression. As one put it, "I felt like I witnessed the best of America." This is worth remembering now, when we too often see the worst, like the deliberate slaughter of defenseless Black people this weekend by a coward with the Nazi insignia etched on his semi-automatic.
So I'm repeating my post from the 50th anniversary. slightly expanded. I remember a few more details, but this gets to the essence of it. Here it is:
I was 17 when I participated in what was officially called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. I was a student at a Catholic high school, and heard my own beliefs expressed by President Kennedy in his television address that June: “We are confronted primarily by a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.”
In the weekly newspaper for the Greensburg, Pennsylvania diocese, the Catholic Accent, I read about an organization called the Catholic Interracial Council that was inviting people to go to the March. I contacted the priest who was named and he talked to my parents. He must have been convincing because I got permission to go.
But I got my first indication of just how small this group was going to be when I attended a meeting, and it was two priests and me. A photographer from the Accent snapped our picture as I pretended to paint the already completed banner we would carry.
As it turned out we were the only three people from the diocese to march under that banner. We would meet other people from the Pittsburgh area, organized by religious groups of various denominations as well as by labor unions and civil rights groups.
Many traveled to the March from all over the country by bus, and a few by plane, including celebrities from Hollywood and legendary entertainer and activist Josephine Baker from Paris. I boarded a special train from Pittsburgh, one of the twenty or so originating from various places that were added to take people to the March. Recently reviewing video from that day posted on YouTube, I was amazed to see a few frames of my 17 year-old self arriving at Washington’s Union Station (at about the 11:32, 11:33 marks), walking towards the camera and trying to look appropriately serious, in my best suit, white shirt and tie.
I also looked alert. Vigilance to the possibility of violence was universal that day. From police commissioner Bull Connor unleashing police dogs on demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, to the murder of Medgar Evers outside his home in Mississippi, it had been a brutal summer in the South. It’s been estimated that over 14,000 demonstrators across the South (including high school students) were arrested during those months, with at least one death.
When I got home I wrote (in the Catholic Accent) of the “dedicated and dignified fervor” around me at the march. But high spirits were also part of that day’s rhythm. From Union Station to the Lincoln Memorial there was always singing. For me it started even earlier, when I restlessly explored the train, wandering through one quiet car after another until I suddenly pushed open a heavy door to a car literally packed to the rafters with young people. Some were perched in the luggage racks. Several at the far end of the car were playing guitars, and everyone was singing.
The march itself was like one long song. It is more powerful in my memory than the hours of speeches at the reflecting pool. Looking into the faces of the people nearest me, and all of us looking around, my feelings became a reflection of what we felt in common.
In the weekly newspaper for the Greensburg, Pennsylvania diocese, the Catholic Accent, I read about an organization called the Catholic Interracial Council that was inviting people to go to the March. I contacted the priest who was named and he talked to my parents. He must have been convincing because I got permission to go.
But I got my first indication of just how small this group was going to be when I attended a meeting, and it was two priests and me. A photographer from the Accent snapped our picture as I pretended to paint the already completed banner we would carry.
As it turned out we were the only three people from the diocese to march under that banner. We would meet other people from the Pittsburgh area, organized by religious groups of various denominations as well as by labor unions and civil rights groups.
Many traveled to the March from all over the country by bus, and a few by plane, including celebrities from Hollywood and legendary entertainer and activist Josephine Baker from Paris. I boarded a special train from Pittsburgh, one of the twenty or so originating from various places that were added to take people to the March. Recently reviewing video from that day posted on YouTube, I was amazed to see a few frames of my 17 year-old self arriving at Washington’s Union Station (at about the 11:32, 11:33 marks), walking towards the camera and trying to look appropriately serious, in my best suit, white shirt and tie.
I also looked alert. Vigilance to the possibility of violence was universal that day. From police commissioner Bull Connor unleashing police dogs on demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, to the murder of Medgar Evers outside his home in Mississippi, it had been a brutal summer in the South. It’s been estimated that over 14,000 demonstrators across the South (including high school students) were arrested during those months, with at least one death.
When I got home I wrote (in the Catholic Accent) of the “dedicated and dignified fervor” around me at the march. But high spirits were also part of that day’s rhythm. From Union Station to the Lincoln Memorial there was always singing. For me it started even earlier, when I restlessly explored the train, wandering through one quiet car after another until I suddenly pushed open a heavy door to a car literally packed to the rafters with young people. Some were perched in the luggage racks. Several at the far end of the car were playing guitars, and everyone was singing.
The march itself was like one long song. It is more powerful in my memory than the hours of speeches at the reflecting pool. Looking into the faces of the people nearest me, and all of us looking around, my feelings became a reflection of what we felt in common.
From the Lincoln Memorial, Peter, Paul and Mary sang the Dylan song I loved--it was still new then--"Blowin in the Wind." Later we--all quarter-million of us--sang "We Shall Overcome" with them, Dylan, Theodore Bikel and the Freedom Singers.
We were astonished by our numbers, by the fact of us all there, of the reality that was completely new. The overwhelming mood was wonder. It was a sustained altered state, a living dream.
We had a sense of unanticipated numbers on the march, but the dimensions of the day weren’t clear until we got to the reflecting pool. So many people (since settled at 250,000, the largest demonstration in U.S. history to that date) and yet the transfixing feeling of peace—I don’t think anyone had foreseen this.
I saw the joy and wonder and the tears as black people of different ages and from different parts of the country saw each other there. I was also aware that in this context they could see a young white face undistorted by hate or contempt.
We’d marched and sung together, but even as an audience for the program at the Lincoln Memorial, the interactions didn’t stop-- interactions that in the mid-1960s were still rare.
Now we stood in line together at portable water fountains and toilets. We bunched and sprawled on the grass together, sweating under the same steamy sun, both drowsy and responsive to the inspiring words and music coming through the not always comprehensible fuzz of the sound system. We felt careful courtesy becoming a release into a common regard. We looked at each other.
We listened to Dr. Martin Luther King together, quoting an American hymn—“From every mountainside, let freedom ring!” We heard his American litany reach its crescendo: “Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!...Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!”
“And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring... 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!’"
When a subjugated people are freed, everyone is freed--that's the message behind this day, that informs the most famous part of this speech, when he describes the dream--a dream that in some ways he saw reflected in the water in front of him. (He'd used the "I have a dream" refrain before, and at the time I thought I had already heard it. That seems unlikely, so maybe it was just so right that it seemed like it had always been there.)
The official intent of the March was to support passage of the Civil Rights bill that President Kennedy sent to Congress a few days after his June speech. Immediately afterwards I recall commentary in the press calling it a failure because that bill was stalled in Congress (it would pass in early 1964.) Today the march is better remembered than the political reason for it.
Race has still not been erased as deep separation, nor has full racial justice been achieved. But sixty years after that day, my memories aren’t of politics or even history. They are physical. They are of a possible America glimpsed by being lived.
copyright 2013, 2023 by William Kowinski
We were astonished by our numbers, by the fact of us all there, of the reality that was completely new. The overwhelming mood was wonder. It was a sustained altered state, a living dream.
We had a sense of unanticipated numbers on the march, but the dimensions of the day weren’t clear until we got to the reflecting pool. So many people (since settled at 250,000, the largest demonstration in U.S. history to that date) and yet the transfixing feeling of peace—I don’t think anyone had foreseen this.
I saw the joy and wonder and the tears as black people of different ages and from different parts of the country saw each other there. I was also aware that in this context they could see a young white face undistorted by hate or contempt.
We’d marched and sung together, but even as an audience for the program at the Lincoln Memorial, the interactions didn’t stop-- interactions that in the mid-1960s were still rare.
Now we stood in line together at portable water fountains and toilets. We bunched and sprawled on the grass together, sweating under the same steamy sun, both drowsy and responsive to the inspiring words and music coming through the not always comprehensible fuzz of the sound system. We felt careful courtesy becoming a release into a common regard. We looked at each other.
We listened to Dr. Martin Luther King together, quoting an American hymn—“From every mountainside, let freedom ring!” We heard his American litany reach its crescendo: “Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!...Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!”
“And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring... 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!’"
When a subjugated people are freed, everyone is freed--that's the message behind this day, that informs the most famous part of this speech, when he describes the dream--a dream that in some ways he saw reflected in the water in front of him. (He'd used the "I have a dream" refrain before, and at the time I thought I had already heard it. That seems unlikely, so maybe it was just so right that it seemed like it had always been there.)
The official intent of the March was to support passage of the Civil Rights bill that President Kennedy sent to Congress a few days after his June speech. Immediately afterwards I recall commentary in the press calling it a failure because that bill was stalled in Congress (it would pass in early 1964.) Today the march is better remembered than the political reason for it.
Race has still not been erased as deep separation, nor has full racial justice been achieved. But sixty years after that day, my memories aren’t of politics or even history. They are physical. They are of a possible America glimpsed by being lived.
copyright 2013, 2023 by William Kowinski
