Nearly 60 years ago, on Aug. 28, 1963, more than 250,000 people walked down Constitution and Independence Avenues to gather at the Lincoln Memorial where they heard speakers, songs, and prayers to push America to change.
The event was the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,” in which a litany of Civil Rights and labor leaders demanded voting rights, fair wages, economic justice, educational equity and advancements, and a true end to segregation.
Dr. Gerald Durley, the retired pastor of Atlanta’s Providence Missionary Baptist Church and a veteran Civil Rights activist, was standing in the crowd in 1963. “I came to the March as the president of the student body at Tennessee State University,”
“It was a huge gathering and so hot that day,” Durley, 81, said.
Organizing the Historic March
From groups of college students to labor unions, getting 250,000 people at a time of segregation was no easy task.
A. Philip Randolph, a long-time civil rights activist who served as vice president of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of International Organization (AFL-CIO) and was a founder of the Negro American Labor Council, proposed the March in 1962.
Key organizers included leaders of the six major Civil Rights organizations: Randolph; Roy Wilkins of the NAACP; the National Urban League’s Whitney Young, Jr; James Farmer of the Conference of Racial Equality (CORE); and former U.S. Congressman John Lewis, then leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
The planning of the march was handled by Bayard Rustin, Randolph’s associate who had extensive experience in organizing protests. Rustin established offices in Harlem, New York, and Washington D.C. to put together a staff of more than 200 volunteers.
District of Columbia representative to Congress Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) was a Yale Law School student who volunteered that 1968 summer to help Rustin in New York. She came back to Washington, D.C. on the morning of the event.
Norton wondered how the turnout of the March would be, that is until the plane was on its final approach into National Airport.
“Looking out the window, I knew that the March would be an extraordinary success because I could see people lining up early in the morning, all over Washington preparing to go,” Norton told WUSA-9 in an interview. “That was a sight to behold.”
Historic ‘I Have A Dream’ Speech Resonates 60 Years Later
Among the speakers at the March were: A. Phillip Randolph, Rustin, Roy Wilkins, and James Farmer with music provided by Mahalia Jackson and others. But late in the program came a 34-year-old preacher from Atlanta who was the 16th speaker out of 18 slated to make remarks.
“Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Said on that August day. “But 100 years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination, One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty amid a vast ocean of material prosperity.”
“The real impact of Dr. King’s speech was after the fact,” Durley explained. “Five months later President John F. Kennedy would be assassinated.”
On August 26, Durley will join the Rev. Al Sharpton, Martin Luther King III, Andrea Waters King and dozens of organizations for the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington.
“My dad’s speech at the March on Washington nearly 60 years ago was a profound moment in American history,” said Martin Luther King III, chairman of the Drum Major Institute. ”Despite the significant progress we have made over these six decades, we need to rededicate ourselves to the mission my dad gave his life for. It is difficult to not be disgruntled with everything going on in the world.”
Waters King, president of the Drum Major Institute and King III’s wife, said the U.S. and current justice fighters are rallying for issues activists 60 years ago worked to combat.
“The struggles Black and brown Americans, particularly women and girls, faced 60 years ago are, in many ways, still prevalent today,” said Waters King, before offering a charge.
“Dr. King called on us all to work to eradicate the triple evils of racism, poverty and violence by standing for peace, justice and equity. As a mother, I’m afraid for my teenage daughter, but I am empowered to use my voice to ensure her future, and the future of all young girls, is as bright as her grandfather dreamed.”