Witnesses to History: Spectators reflect on attending the ’63 March on Washington

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In the summer of 1963, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom attracted an estimated 250,000 attendees and participants.

Here are the reflections of a few of those thousands, who were witnesses to what many call a game-changing moment in the civil rights movement.

It was, at the time, the largest protest in the history of the nation’s capital, and one without any reported incidents or arrests. It would catapult Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to national prominence, in part through the seminal delivery of his “I Have a Dream” speech. For eyewitnesses to this historic oratory, the march was additionally an opportunity to hopefully turn the tide of social justice in American society.

A dangerous journey to the march

At the time of the march, Irvin C. Walker, Jr. was a 17-year-old junior in high school in Jackson, Mississippi and president of the West Jackson Chapter of the NAACP Youth Council. Walker was selected to attend the March on Washington along with about 35 other civil rights activists, including his mentor in the movement, Sam Bailey, who served as the right-hand man to civil rights icon Medgar W. Evers.

“After receiving the blessings of my family and friends, and permission to miss a few days of football practice, I braced myself in anticipation of the trip and the march itself,” Walker told theGrio of his remembrances.

Walker boarded a chartered Trailways Bus the day before the march on what he calls his “pilgrimage” to Washington, D.C. The first rest stop was at a bus station in Meridian, Mississippi. There, Walker says the passengers were met with violence from a white mob when they attempted to get food service from the “white only” side of the station.

“As I recall, we were hurried back onto the bus as we received notice that a Klan gathering was being formed only a few blocks away,” Walker recalls. “We received a Mississippi Highway Patrol escort to the Alabama state line and proceeded on our trip singing freedom songs and praying all the way to D.C. We arrived in the early morning, tired from the journey, but filled with the spirit of freedom.”

Just a short year later, three young civil rights workers, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney, would be killed by a Ku Klux Klan lynch mob near Meridian while working to register black voters.

A New Yorker remembers, 50 years later

Frances Brazier, 73, grew up in New York City and was one of many residents of the Big Apple that made the trip to nearby D.C. for the march. She grew up in Brooklyn, a far cry from her mother’s upbringing in rural Georgia. When, at 23, Brazier attended the march, her mother was right there with her.

“My family was always very progressive,” Brazier told theGrio. “I remember the first day I went to school, my mom sitting me down, and telling me that I’d be at a school with a white teacher and preparing me for what may or may not happen. She was that aware. I remember she would read in the paper about Ghandi, and what was going on in India, and would stop me in the middle of playing outside to read to me about passive resistance.”

Brazier says by the time black Americans began taking action against discrimination in the United States, she had already been primed. Brazier and her mother took part in a 1960 picketing of Woolworth’s department store in solidarity with Southern sit-ins at regional store counters. When the March on Washington was announced, they made the decision, along with a friend of the family, to attend.

She wore a knit, multi-colored summer dress and flat shoes, a choice deliberately made with the heat and anticipated portable toilets in mind.

“The bus picked us up near Brooklyn Avenue and Pacific Street. It was really early, just before daybreak,” Brazier recalls. “I remember the bus that was sent for us was very nice, everything was well organized and written along the side of the bus were the words ‘On to Washington.’ The letters were slanted in a way that made them look like they were moving forward. On the road we’d see people, many white, driving in their cars and waving at us and doing the thumbs up, saying ‘go for it.'”

Brazier says she never thought for a moment there would be any problem along the way.

A city prepared for violence

Already in the D.C. area, Ellen Pechman’s family was a part of a cadre of Jewish Americans that had attempted to move to the city after World War II to get jobs in government. They couldn’t, however, because of discriminatory housing restrictions that barred blacks and Jews from some neighborhoods. Her family and a few others banded together, purchased land about 20 minutes outside the District along the Potomac River, and built homes.

Pechman was 19-years-old in the summer of 1963. Her father, an economist at the Brookings Institution, had pulled a few strings to get her job in the White House Correspondents Unit answering incoming calls to the White House.

“The men in the neighborhood left for work in a car pool. I’d go along with them and people were beginning to talk about plans for a march,” Pechman told theGrio. “They were exuberant about it, because we knew just how bad things were and that the situation needed a strong voice. All summer long we talked about the march.”

Up until that point, there had never been a demonstration as large as the planned March on Washington. Organizers expected 100,000 participants to gather in D.C., which was tense with the anticipation of so many black Americans descending upon the city. Authorities feared the march would lead to violence. In fact, when Roy Wilkins and Martin Luther King, Jr. appeared on Meet the Press prior to the march, panelists questioned if, “it would be impossible to bring more than 100,000 militant Negroes into Washington without incidents and possibly rioting.”

The day of the march, all D.C. liquor stores and bars were ordered closed. The Washington Senators baseball game against the Minnesota Twins was cancelled and federal employees, including Pechman, were given the day off. With plans to attend the march, she had already asked for the day off weeks earlier.

“I asked for leave, and they told me that I couldn’t take off, and that I didn’t want to be a part of ‘anything like that.’ We went through a whole go ‘round that resulted in them telling me I couldn’t go,” she said. “Then Kennedy sent out a bulletin announcing the government would be closed. Everyone in the car pool decided we would go.”

Great expectations of a youth

B.D. Colen turned 17 days before the march.

“Despite my age, I was a careful reader of The New York Times,” Colen told theGrio. “I got both the old Herald-Tribune and the Times everyday. I also subscribed to The New Republic and the National Review. I was aware of what was going on in the South. I knew who the members of the march’s planning committee were and their involvement signaled to me it was going to be an important event.”

The teenager had taken a job as an unpaid photographer for the Westport Town Crier, a small newspaper near his home in Connecticut. He had been assigned to cover the planning meeting of a local group that was going to attend the march. Yet, although he’d never reported a story, Colen decided that he wanted to travel with the group to cover what would soon become known as the historic March on Washington.

Colen arrived with his contingent from Connecticut in the early morning. He recalls travelling down Constitution Avenue, toward the Lincoln Memorial. “Everybody was polite and friendly,” he says. “There was the expected pushing that comes along with a crowd, but everyone was really respectful. It was not really yet the ’60s as we think of it. What we think of as the ’60s really didn’t start until 1965. It might as well have been the ’50s, with everyone dressed very neatly and being very orderly.”

Former C.I.A. director remembers the day

There was a large military and police presence at the march, as well. The entire D.C. police force was mobilized, along with 500 military reservists and 2,500 members of the National Guard. Organizers recruited and trained nearly 2,000 parade marshals, mostly members of the Guardians Association, a fraternal organization of black police officers. James Woolsey, then a State Department intern, was one of a few whites that volunteered as a marshal.

He would go on to become the 16th director of the Central Intelligence Agency.