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Attended by an estimated quarter of a million people, this march was a peaceful demonstration to advance civil rights and economic equality. The August 28, 1963, March on Washington was one of the largest demonstrations ever witnessed in Washington, D.C., and it was the first to have extensive coverage by the electronic media. Successful in pressuring the administration of President John F. Kennedy to initiate a strong civil rights bill in the Congress, the marchers gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, 100 years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Not only did the March on Washington influence the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, it also galvanized public opinion. It was during this peaceful demonstration that Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his iconic famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

Far more complicated than the romanticized imagery remembered by most, the integrationist, non-violent, liberal brand of protest that the march represented was followed by a more revolutionary, combative, and race-conscious line of attack. However, because of the march’s power of mass appeal, the 1963 March on Washington became the prototype for other social reforms, including the antiwar, feminist, and environmental movements. The 1963 March on Washington was not precedent-setting, though. Several marches or proposed marches occurred earlier. They included the proposed 1941 march called by Asa Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the May 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom and the 1958 Youth March for Integrated Schools. The objectives of these marches still had not been implemented by 1963. African Americans continued to face high unemployment, systemic denial of the right to vote, and the omnipresent racial segregation code of the South. The government’s failure to act on those goals prompted civil rights leaders to call for a march on Washington for economic, political, and social justice.

The civil rights leaders’ developed goals were to pass an all-encompassing civil rights bill that negated Jim Crow public accommodation practices and to assure protection of the right to vote. They also wanted systems put in place to adequately address the breach of constitutional rights, a federal works program to train unemployed workers, and a Federal Fair Employment Practices Act banning discrimination in all employment. Commonly referred to in the press as the “Big Six,” Randolph; Whitney Young, president of the National Urban League; Roy Wilkins, president of the NAACP; James Farmer, president of the CORE; King, the founder and president of the SCLC; and John Lewis, president of the SNCC were the major players in the March on Washington.

Bayard Rustin, organizer of the CORE’s 1947 Journey of Reconciliation freedom ride, coordinated and administered the particulars of the march. Although women had played vital roles in the movement, they were thrust into the background of the August 28, 1963, march. No woman marched down Constitution Avenue with King, Randolph, Wilkins, and other male civil rights leaders; no woman went to the White House afterward to meet with President John F. Kennedy. However, because of Anna Arnold Hedgeman, the only woman on the march’s planning committee, as a last-minute tribute the Negro Women Fighters for Freedom Award was given to Daisy Bates, Diane Nash, Rosa Parks, Gloria Richardson, Merlie Evers, and Mrs. Herbert Lee, the wife of the murdered farmer in Amite County, Mississippi.

The 1963 March on Washington (Library of Congress).

A draft of John Lewis’s prepared speech circulated before the march. Because of its militant tone against the Kennedy Administration, it was denounced by other march participants. In a meeting with King, Randolph, and the SNCC’s James Forman, Lewis agreed to tone down his criticism of the federal government. Not all endorsed the march. Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam condemned it, and the executive board of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) withheld its support, adopting a neutral position. President Kennedy originally discouraged the march, fearing that it might make Congress vote against civil rights laws in reaction to a perceived threat. Once it became clear that the march would go on, however, he became a supporter. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965> passed after Kennedy’s assassination, and the provisions of each echoed the demands of the 1963 March on Washington. After the march, however, young African Americans increasingly turned to the Black Power Movement.

Linda T. Wynn