More Than a Dream: Part One

What would happen if the press published the false story? Would it hurt his reputation? Would it undermine the civil rights movement?

His efforts paid off, and he was hailed as a hero.

Then, fifteen years later, shortly before the United States entered World War II, the labor leader acquired legendary status by squaring off against President Franklin Roosevelt.

But rather than seeking another Oval Office meeting, he came up with a radical idea—an all-Black march on Washington!

Like many others, she believed that the march might provoke violence and create backlash in Congress.

I feel that if any incident occurs as a result of this, it may engender so much bitterness that it will create in Congress even more solid opposition from certain groups than we have had in the past.

The federal government must step in, Randolph asserted.

Randolph and Rustin were fervent socialists.

Capitalists say that the economy operates best when the government doesn’t interfere with it. Socialists urge the government to build an economy that serves everyone’s basic needs. Capitalists argue that business and industry owners can best serve society by earning profits. Socialists claim that the pursuit of profit alone creates an unequal society where rich people rule over poor people.

“The one hundred years since the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation have witnessed no fundamental government action to terminate the economic subordination of the American Negro,” the trio wrote.

In 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution finally ended chattel slavery in the United States.

But it was in line with Randolph’s more recent efforts to form coalitions with labor unions and religious groups.

A month later, he dropped the word “pilgrimage”—which suggested a quiet religious journey—and used the more militant-sounding “march.”

“And that march should include from 25,000—or better, 100,000—persons to move President Kennedy and the administration to urgency and action on the Negro job plight.”

The council members voted yes, giving Randolph the credibility and traction that he needed for enlisting other civil rights leaders, including the most influential of them all—Martin Luther King, Jr.

“We are at the point where we can mobilize all this righteous indignation into a powerful mass movement,” he told an adviser in early June.

Civil rights activists “will tie up transportation by laying our bodies prostrate on runways of airports, across railroad tracks and at bus depots.”

At the end of the meeting, their representatives held a press conference to announce that “100,000 or more Negroes” would march on Washington and that tentative plans called for a massive rally at the Lincoln Memorial.

The bill faced stiff resistance in Congress from socially conservative Republicans and Democrats, especially those from the South.

Cordial and mannerly, the president greeted everyone before taking a seat and beginning his remarks.

Perhaps the biggest obstacles were members of his own party—Dixiecrats, white Southern Democrats who opposed racial integration.

Up until this moment, no one had broached the controversial topic at hand—the proposed march on Washington.

“There will be a march,” Randolph declared.
Kennedy stood his ground. “To get the votes we need, we have, first, to oppose demonstrations which will lead to violence, and, second, give Congress a fair chance to work its will.”

The march, he said, “could serve as a means through which people with legitimate discontents could channel their grievances under disciplined, nonviolent leadership… It may seem ill-timed. Frankly, I have never engaged in any direct-action movement which did not seem ill-timed.”

He had attended the White House meeting and was a staunch supporter of both the civil rights movement and President Kennedy.

The lunch soon became a negotiating session, with Wilkins expressing his wariness about the march. “I favored the quiet, patient lobbying tactics that worked best on Congress,” he said later.

Rustin had nixed the two-day protest to avoid the logistical nightmare, as well as the added dangers, of one hundred thousand tired, hungry, vulnerable people trying to find places to sleep and eat.

Rustin had nixed the two-day protest to avoid the logistical nightmare, as well as the added dangers, of one hundred thousand tired, hungry, vulnerable people trying to find places to sleep and eat.

The Big Six quibbled over the details, but they agreed that the protest would be officially named the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,” and that it would take place the following month, on Wednesday, August 28, 1963.

Bishop Stephen Spottswood, the chair of the NAACP, tried his best to quiet the noisy crowd of thirty thousand, but the boos and jeers were unrelenting.

He understood that the crowd was directing its fury at the man standing next to him—Reverend J. H. Jackson, president of the National Baptist Convention, the largest denomination of Black Baptists in the United States.

Nine days earlier, Jackson had called for a sixty-day stoppage to all civil rights demonstrations. Because the moratorium would begin on July 4, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom would be among the canceled protests.

The grueling meeting dragged on, and Evers did not return home until past midnight.

“Uncle Tom, go home!” they yelled, suggesting that Jackson groveled before white people.

After ten minutes of nonstop booing and jeering, Jackson acknowledged defeat and walked off the platform. But even that did little to quell the fury.

The murder of Medgar Evers had radicalized civil rights activists. They were steaming mad, and they would no longer tolerate moderates who, like J. H. Jackson, wanted to slow or stop protests.

A dozen witnesses, some coerced by the local sheriff, supported Hurst’s claim, and an all-white jury acquitted him on the same day the killing took place.

A dozen witnesses, some coerced by the local sheriff, supported Hurst’s claim, and an all-white jury acquitted him on the same day the killing took place.

One of the eyewitnesses, a Black man named Louis Allen, later recanted his testimony, saying that Lee had never attacked Hurst.

By turning the march into a commemoration of civil rights activists who had been murdered, the Big Six made the march even more radical than it was.