More Than a Dream: Part Two

Phones rang nonstop, desks were stacked high with flyers, and envelopes were strewn on the floor.

All three protests called for the speedy implementation of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the 1954 US Supreme Court ruling that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.

“If you want to organize anything,” he said, “assume that everybody is absolutely stupid. And assume yourself that you’re stupid.”

Meeting all the marchers’ needs was one way to make sure that sparks didn’t fly, but Rustin still worried about the dire prediction of countless critics—The march will explode in violence!

As Representative James Haley of Florida put it rather glumly, the march “could be the spark which could touch off an ugly, blood-letting riot, accompanied perhaps by killings.”

To his chagrin, Rustin quickly learned that some of his plans posed significant logistical problems.

It’s illegal to protest on Capitol grounds, he said. Plus, the Capitol was outside the jurisdiction controlled by the Metropolitan Police Department, having its own security force.

Johnson was an esteemed officer, and his NYPD contacts ran deep.

Rustin poured out his frustration, telling Johnson he did not want armed white police officers inside the crowd of mostly Black marchers on August 28. The mix would be volatile, he said.

“Your job is to see that 100,000 persons behave,” he told the Guardians, using the most authoritative voice he could muster.

The president said that march organizers were cooperating with “the police,” and he even praised the march as a “peaceful assembly calling for a redress of grievances.”

Perhaps Rustin had heeded the police department’s warning that Pennsylvania Avenue, especially in front of the White House, was too small for one hundred thousand marchers, and that a protest on Capitol grounds would be illegal.

Perhaps he’d wanted to streamline the march and take away opportunities for things to go wrong in too many places.

Nevertheless, to bolster his case, Rustin presented his new plan—a march from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, followed by a rally at the Memorial—as an innovative, and revolutionary, way to lobby political leaders.

But in keeping with this new—and more profound—concept of lobbying, our 100,000 marchers will not go to Capitol Hill, nor to the White House.

In 1963, the federal government was known for its “go slow” approach to civil rights; racial discrimination and violence against Black people were pervasive, especially in the South; and Black people suffered from unemployment, underemployment, bias in hiring and firing practices, and a lack of rights in their workplace.

Did they seek to uproot racial and economic inequality and to supplant it with policies and practices that would lead to liberty and justice for all?

“Our demonstration—the largest and most significant in the history of Washington—will bear eloquent witness that we do not come to beg or plead for rights denied for centuries.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., was so concerned that he wrote about the problem in a blistering newspaper column.
“Up to this time, the crusade for Negro rights has been sadly lacking in an awareness, by Negroes themselves, of the persuasive power of numbers,” King wrote.

The march is a farce—a performance managed by the government and filled by whites.

Within the Big Ten, union leader Walter Reuther—a Kennedy friend and confidant—helped ensure that the march’s message and tactics would be favorable toward Kennedy.

“I was sentenced to 60 days, but I was a very young man at the time, and I do not care to elaborate on it,” he said.

Standing in the Senate well, Thurmond used information from FBI files to criticize Rustin’s arrest for refusing military service in World War II, his many arrests for civil disobedience, his past membership in the Young Communist League, his attendance at a Communist Party convention, and his failure to denounce “Communist ideological dogma.”

Standing in the Senate well, Thurmond used information from FBI files to criticize Rustin’s arrest for refusing military service in World War II, his many arrests for civil disobedience, his past membership in the Young Communist League, his attendance at a Communist Party convention, and his failure to denounce “Communist ideological dogma.”

Standing in the Senate well, Thurmond used information from FBI files to criticize Rustin’s arrest for refusing military service in World War II, his many arrests for civil disobedience, his past membership in the Young Communist League, his attendance at a Communist Party convention, and his failure to denounce “Communist ideological dogma.”

Commenting on the articles, Thurmond said that Rustin “was arrested for vagrancy..."

At the meeting, the Big Ten were agitated, to say the least. Wilkins was livid—but only at Thurmond!

“Twenty-two arrests in the fight for civil rights attest, in my mind, to Mr. Rustin’s dedication to high human ideals.”

“That Mr. Rustin was on one occasion arrested in another connection has long been a matter of public record, and not an object of concealment. There are those who contend that this incident, which took place many years ago, voids or overwhelms Mr. Rustin’s ongoing contribution to the struggle for human rights. I hold otherwise.”

I am dismayed that there are men in this country who, wrapping themselves in the mantle of Christian morality, would mutilate the most elementary conceptions of human decency, privacy, and humility in order to persecute other men.

“It was like a boil being lanced.”

Just after joining the committee, she’d advocated for Dorothy Height, the leader of the National Council of Negro Women, to become an official leader of the march, on equal par with A. Philip Randolph and other civil rights leaders.

“We knew, firsthand, that most of the civil rights movement audiences were largely comprised of women, children, and youth,” Height said.

In her lecture, Hedgeman warned that although “all women have serious employment problems, Negro women carry the additional handicap of colored with its attendant discrimination with regard to training, apprentice opportunities, and job opportunities.”

Now, at the meeting to review the Lincoln Memorial program, Hedgeman seethed. Politely but firmly, she pushed yet again for adding a woman speaker.

Horowitz’s transportation memorandum shows a number far less than the two hundred thousand marchers that Cleveland Robinson predicted.

The brief testimonial would recognize the outstanding work of Evers and five other women in particular: Rosa Parks, who had sparked the Montgomery bus boycott; Daisy Bates, who had led the fight to desegregate schools in Little Rock, Arkansas; Diane Nash, who had headed the Nashville student movement and participated in the Freedom Rides; Prince Lee, the widow of murdered SNCC helper Herbert Lee; and Gloria Richardson, the militant leader of the still-raging desegregation protests...

After all, not one woman would give a major speech, and women were relegated to what she knew would be the smaller line of a segregated march.

Pauli Murray, a radical Black activist for civil rights and women’s rights, had a similar reaction, and in a letter to Randolph, she criticized his decision, saying it “can only be construed to mean that you are only concerned with the rights of Negro men only and care little for the rights of all people.”

She was looking forward to protesting for civil rights, but it pained her that “Negro women were accorded little more than token recognition on the March program.”