Anniversary

Nobody Turn Me Around: A People's History of the 1963 March on Washington
Charles Euchner, 2011

Even if the march has been reduced to an "I have a dream" sound-bite, this was the original idea, fifty years ago:

Dr. King's charisma and moral authority—and the power of his speech that day—were crucial to the march, but he is not the center of this book. Euchner writes about the people and politics behind the march, and about the meaning of the event, as reflected by the stories of many who participated that hot summer day.

The idea originated with A. Philip Randolph. During a lifetime of organizing black workers, he first conceived of a mass march on Washington during the 1940s. Returning to the idea in 1963, Randolph was at first rejected by Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and Whitney Young of the Urban League.

Despite his ultimate identification with the march, Martin Luther King Jr. at first declined to participate. Busy with the Birmingham campaign—and unsure of the march's value—it would take much persuasion by some of his closest advisers for him to commit.

After key groups finally agreed to join forces, Bayard Rustin brilliantly outlined an organizational plan for the largest march to ever take place in D.C. It was a feat that would be pulled off in just two months of intense work. In this very quick read, Euchner covers much fascinating background detail of how the march was put together.

In a discussion here, the author says of the organizers and marchers he interviewed

... every time I talked with someone I was carried away emotionally like I'd never been before. I was so overwhelmed by the basic decency and courage of these wonderful people who did so much to end the formal regime of racism. It is really a priceless gift that they gave us. And they gave it to us in so many ways — some dramatic, some ordinary. Honestly, despite the problems we have in this country now, they pale next to what they would be if we lived under the legal system of apartheid that existed in the U.S. until the 1960s.

With ongoing violence all over the south in 1963, the bravery of young activists gave older workers the courage to risk employer reprisals by missing work to be in D.C. That was because Rustin had chosen a Wednesday for the march; in Euchner's words, "so preachers could bring their flocks without missing Sunday services."

The power of Dr. King's speech is undeniable, though Euchner quotes a King aide who was dismayed to hear King insert what seemed like an overused, corny "dream" metaphor. More importantly, what later came to be the media narrative—"the March on DC where MLK had a Dream"—leaves out the point of the march: to demand economic rights, simply as part of a broader concept of equal justice promised to all citizens, yet denied to so many.

There's interesting contemporary coverage in Life's cover story (with work of eleven photographers credited). Dr. King "made the day's strongest speech," read a photo caption, which goes on to highlight not the "dream," but the metaphor that "America has given the Negro people a bad check. It has come back marked 'insufficient funds'"

National archive footage gives a sense of crowd, along with bits of music and speeches.

The march was a triumph—and subsequent civil rights legislation shifted the movement, in Rustin's words, "from protest to politics." The "jobs" part of the formula would become more evident in King's later work. When that joined with his opposition to the Vietnam War, King had come around to Rustin's linking of social justice with economics and opposition to war.

"From protest to politics," fifty years later: not the prettiest picture on the jobs front, to be sure.

And the work to undo justice has achieved much, with the Supreme Court's green light for voter disenfranchisement in states, "stand your ground" laws in the same states, and all the other tactics financed by the right's deep pockets.

The Court's majority wreaked vengeance against the Voting Rights Act, on a pretense of "little evidence of continuing racial discrimination in the states that were required to get preclearance before changing their voting laws." It's the same line the right's paid pundits use: we have a black president; there's no racism—as they use that president's very existence to fuel more racism each day.

Sam Seder and Prof. Eddie Glaude had this discussion of the anniversary. Glaude notes the event has been made into a symbol of "the goodness of America; that we've come so far and we celebrate." Thus ignoring the march's origins: in the black labor movement and as an act of mass non-violent civil disobedience.

Seder points to more recent years, when "everything to do with economics has been swept under the rug." The problem is that this anniversary becomes one of "commemoration in service of a narrative," instead of attention to the real political work needed.

Glaude has much to say about Obama, and how the focus on him as an individual co-opts black progressive traditions and establishes a precedent for how future presidents will deal with race.

Certainly, the right's use of Obama as the example of "no racism to see here" follows years of effort to brand MLK as being on their side. As Charles Pierce puts it, "the great loophole" of Dr. King's speech is the only part conservatives choose to know: the "not judged by the color of their skin but the content of their character" line—

... it subsequently has been used as an opening through which all manner of historically backsliding mischief has come a'wandering in, from "reverse discrimination" to Allan Bakke, to what is going on today with the franchise in too many places, to the reaction to the killing of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of George Zimmerman. Modern conservatives have used that line to conscript Dr. King into their ideology, now that he's dead and unable to speak for himself. ...
...

...The greatest and most lasting use of the great loophole has been to fasten Dr. King in our history as a devout and relatively harmless national icon, and not the true revolutionary that he was.

If things are grim at the national level, Prof. Glaude sees hope for local coalition building around social justice issues affecting both the poor and middle class, as in North Carolina's Moral Mondays protests. He finds these actions recall the best of the black freedom struggle, in focusing on issues of justice for all. It's a focus that brings about, in James Baldwin's words, a "re-imagining of America."

Euchner ends his book with a passage from Robert Penn Warren's interview of Bayard Rustin. The enduring power and inspiration in the faces of people in D.C. that August day, and in the remembrances of Euchner's interviewees, lies in something Rustin speaks to here—

... I happen to believe... the Negro is, as it were, the chosen people, by which I do not mean that he is superior or that he is better or that he's any more noble. It means, I think, that he has now an identity which is part of the struggle in this country for the extension of democracy.