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.
Woolsey had just graduated from Stanford University that spring, and would soon leave for Oxford University in the fall. That summer he had also volunteered for the Congress of Racial Equality’s (CORE) direct action project, tutoring kids in inner city D.C. When organizers approached CORE workers looking for marshals, he was happy to help.
“As I remember, we went through some nonviolence training,” Woolsey told theGrio. “People were really worried about hard-right Nazi groups coming across the river from Northern Virginia and starting something. All we were supposed to do was lie in front of the Nazis and keep them from disrupting the march. But once we saw just how large the crowd was, we knew not much could disrupt it.”
Woolsey says, instead confrontations with Nazis, marshals spent most of their time moving through the peaceful crowd, getting stretchers for people who were overcome by the heat, and distributing water.
“Because of the heat, everyone was sort of wilted,” says Woolsey. “A lot of people took off their coats and shoes and sat near the reflecting pool. As I recall, King was one of the last speakers. As it became clear that he was about to come up, all over the tidal basin and without any announcement, everybody started standing up, fixing their ties and putting on their hats, coats and shoes.”
Woolsey, who was standing about 50 yards from the podium, says it’s a moment he’ll never forget.
“It has since been my measurement of a leader,” he says. “Anyone that calls his or herself a leader should ask themselves if, in blazing summer heat, they could get a few hundred thousand people to stand up straight and pay attention.”
Stereotypes of blacks, shattered
Pechman’s group left Bethesda and arrived in the city by mid-morning. Her group joined a growing mass of people near the State Department. They all headed toward the Linclon Memorial, finally settling near the front of the crowd, to the right of the main platform.
“It was the largest group of humanity I’d ever imagined,” Pechman says. “I had a very stereotypical view of black people based on images in the media, from the scary laborer to the churchman. That was it. What I saw and was surrounded by that day was something I hadn’t seen before. It was this gorgeous blanket of color. People were dressed in what looked like their best clothes. They were walking quietly with dignity, purpose, with clarity, comfort and clam.”
She doesn’t remember every detail of that day. It was warm, over 80 degrees according to reports. Pechman says the crowd listened to the program over loud speakers and the general vibe was that of a picnic, of a homecoming.
“I remember young children in the trees,” she says. “In trees, and pretty much everything else you could climb, they were up there trying to get the best view.”
Subdued by the heat and long program, they just listened carefully.
Marching in a segregated city
Lloyd E. Clayton was already a married father of two on the day of the march. A resident of Washington, D.C., he was working at Walter Reed Hospital at the time.
“I can’t remember everything, but back then D.C. was segregated. Let me tell you it was segregated,” the 92-year-old told theGrio. “But the march was not limited to any one group of people. There was s variety. It was like there was nothing else in the world going on, but that march. They were hand in hand, and I was most inspired to see people walking together and talking to each other.”
Clayton says he was struck by gospel legend Mahalia Jackson’s performance of “How I Got Over” and, of course, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech.
“We stayed until the end. We couldn’t afford to leave,” Clayton says. “I had no idea it would have such an impact. I worried that it would be just another that thing happened and would soon be forgotten, but it didn’t turn out that way.”
Remembering the “Dream” speech
The starting title of Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream” speech was “Normalcy – Never Again,” the most noted sections of his delivery on August 28, 1963 being improvised and added to the original. It has been said that King was inspired by Mahalia Jackson, a gospel great who was active in the Civil Rights Movement, and attended other events at which Dr. King had preached.
People who were there remember her shouting from behind him, “Tell ‘em about the dream, Martin!” Jackson also performed that day.
“It was long day,” says Colen. “Sadly, I don’t remember many of the performances. I don’t remember John Lewis’ speech. I remember hearing King’s speech — the second half. I’ll say there was no way I thought I was hearing the greatest speech of the 20th century. But when he got to the ‘I have a dream’ part, you couldn’t help but be moved. People who were familiar with the cadences of the black church, they were clearly swept up by it. It was a sermon.”
Pechman says when the program was over she was left with overwhelming joy and optimism. Almost everyone agreed that the event was a phenomenon that signaled some possibility. Woolsey considers the moment a “marvelous linchpin” that made it possible for many Americans to believe that the Civil Right Movement was a worthy cause.
“It was awfully hard after that march for anybody to say the Civil Rights Movement was a bunch of dangerous people doing dangerous things,” Woolsey says. “It turned many average Americans, especially many non-black Americans, into supporters.”
Follow Donovan X. Ramsey on Twitter @iDXR