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This little light of mine
I’m going let it shine – in North Carolina!

It’s Aug. 24 and we have made it to the 50th Anniversary of the original March on Washington.  Germaine Light, my Central Illinois Jobs with Justice sister, and my son-in-law, Ed Elder, have fallen in line with a group of AFSCME and NAACP members who, unlike many in the march, like to sing and chant. We reach back into our memory banks to recall verses from the full repertoire: We Shall Overcome, Ain’t Nobody Going to Turn Me Around, and an updated version of This Little Light of Mine that covers all the states that have recently passed restrictive voting rights laws. At the George Washington Bridge about three-quarters of the way along the line of march on Connecticut Avenue, we turn around at its high point and for the first time are able to register just how large the day’s turnout is: the line reaches back to the horizon – we cannot see its end. What we can see are banners and signs identifying attending groups and the issues of concern. The blue and gold colors of the NAACP provide a steady, sure backdrop for a rainbow of other colors. The green t-shirts of AFSCME, the yellow of the UAW, the blue of SEIU, and the orange of the Laborers are visible. Signs for the League of United Latin American Citizens, NOW, Nuns on the Bus, and the International Socialist Organization are also in evidence. Other placards identify issues of importance to the marchers: “Support Trayvon’s Law”,  “End Mass Incarceration”,  “End the New Jim Crow”, “Justice in the Courts; Justice in the Polls”,  and “Jobs Not War”. The image of Barack Obama is ever-present on flags, on t-shirts next to that of Martin Luther King, and even on makeshift posters.

The considerable numbers of young people in attendance is especially gratifying. A large contingent from Howard University is in evidence. Then there is the dread-locked group chanting to a hip-hop beat: “Ain’t no power like the power of the people ’cause the power of the people don’t stop!” Elders in wheelchairs wave the young people on, while in one family group we pass, a seven-month old baby is swaddled in the t-shirt marked the Hill-Robinson Reunion.

As Cornel West will note at an evening talk Germaine and I attend later in the day, the numbers (in the tens of thousands” as the press reports) and enthusiasm of the crowds are the most inspiring part of the day’s events.  He notes the importance of a mass movement – both in 1963 and today – to any effort to bring Martin Luther King’s dream to fruition. “Martin did not make the movement,” West reminds us, “the movement made Martin.”

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Not surprisingly, West was not invited to speak at the rally preceding the march. Clearly, West is far too critical of the Obama Administration to be among those at the podium. Back in 1963, critics of the standing government were common among the speakers. True, as we have since learned, the Kennedy Administration  was given a kind of censorship power over the speeches delivered in 1963. In exchange for letting the 1963 march proceed, Kennedy operatives reviewed the speeches in advance for any “incendiary” comments or lines that were too directly critical of the sitting President. Nevertheless, speakers were not hesitant to deliver strong arguments in support of civil rights legislation that Kennedy either would not or could not move forward. In this regard, John Lewis, then the young Chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, was particularly pointed in his remarks. The organizers of the 1963 march also sought to maintain their independence from a Democratic Party that was still the political home of a sizable number of segregationist Dixiecrats. Political independence also held out the promise of a certain bargaining advantage among the more liberal wing of the party.

Elected Democrats or individuals closely linked to the party predominated in the roster of speakers at the 2013 march. Of course, John Lewis, now a Congressman representing Georgia, spoke and rightly so. After all, Lewis is the sole survivor among those who spoke in 1963. We also heard from Nancy Pelosi, Eric Holder, and Cory Booker, to name but a few. This “embeddedness” with the Democratic Party is not surprising. The election of the first black president, the nominee of the Democratic Party, is in many ways the culmination of a long-term process that has generated deep structural links, as well as overlaps in both personnel and agendas, between the party and the civil rights community. I have already mentioned the many signs and other paraphernalia at the march that symbolically tied Obama to Martin Luther King. Conversations with numerous NAACP members on the bus returning back home from the march revealed a deep antipathy within the black community to any critics of Obama. For some, Cornel West is a special source of irritation.

Indeed, credit must be given to the Obama Administration for some of its recent initiatives to protect voting rights and decriminalize minor drug offenses. On the other hand, when considering the full roster of demands articulated at the 1963 march, there is room for considered criticism of the President and the Democratic Party, to say nothing of the Republicans at this historical juncture. Nowhere is this more obvious than with regard to economic justice. In 1963 there were demands for: 1) a massive jobs training programs to overcome unemployment across the color lines; 2) an increase in the minimum wage to provide a decent standard of living for all; 3) an expansion in the Fair Labor Standards Act such that wage and hour regulations could be extended to previously uncovered areas of employment.

Today, with the overall unemployment rate hovering at 7.4 percent and that for blacks at 12.6, with 1 out of 6 workers underemployed, with firms increasingly substituting part-time and contingent jobs for secure full-time employment, and with evidence of mounting violations of protective labor legislation – especially where undocumented workers are employed – we seem further away from realizing the “dream” of decent work for all than ever before. Why we find ourselves at this point is too long a story to detail here. The Obama Administration and the Democratic Party, nevertheless, share in the blame for this dismal state of affairs. Democrats, like Republicans, have become too beholden to corporate largesse in order to fund obscenely expensive political campaigns.   A “revolving door” system has also become the norm; this system guarantees politicians lucrative post-office careers in the private sector only if they will do corporate bidding while in office.

Finally, above all, Martin Luther King was a man of peace who saw the direct connection between the moral and economic costs of waging war and a nation’s inability to adequately provide for the economic security and basic human rights of all citizens. It is hard not to believe that Dr. King would have been horrified at the Obama Administration’s pursuit of drone warfare in the Middle East, as well as dismayed by how much of its budget still goes to the military.

Yes, there is room for criticism, but also hope. As suggested by Cornel West, the size and enthusiasm of the crowds on Aug. 24 sustain hope that criticism can translate into change. For ultimately it is from below, out of grassroots social movements, that substantive change occurs and that the “new Jim Crow” assault on civil rights will be overcome and economic security extended.

Patricia Simpson was formerly on the faculty at Loyola University Chicago. She now works part-time for the UIUC Labor Education Program and is an activist with Central Illinois Jobs with Justice.

Sundiata Cha-Jua, professor of history and African American studies, recently spoke with the U of I News Bureau’s Craig Chamberlain about the 1963 March on Washington.

Can you set the stage for the March on Washington? What was happening 50 years ago?

The year 1963 was the most pivotal year in the history of the civil rights movement, and perhaps in the modern black liberation movement. 1963 was the centennial anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. That weighed heavily on African-Americans and provided urgency to their struggle for freedom, self-determination and social transformation. Moreover, the march took place in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial.

Also, many things collided explosively in 1963 to put the civil rights movement and racial oppression at center stage. An estimated 15,000 protesters were arrested in 1,000 anti-apartheid demonstrations in 100 towns and cities across the South, the most important of those in Birmingham (Alabama) during the spring and summer of 1963. There, King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference challenged white supremacy in the country’s most racially violent city. King was arrested as part of that and wrote the civil rights movement’s most important rationale, “Letter From Birmingham Jail.”

It was also there that “Bull” Connor, Birmingham’s ironically titled director of public safety, unleashed police dogs and high pressure fire hoses on defenseless school-age children, producing some of the most iconic images from the civil rights movement.
A rapid series of events over two days in June also explains why 1963 is riveted into American historical consciousness. On June 11, Alabama Gov. George Wallace blocked two students from enrolling at the University of Alabama (one of them the sister-in-law of current U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder). President John F. Kennedy then federalized the Alabama National Guard and gave a transformative televised speech that night. Then the prominent civil rights activist Medgar Evers was assassinated the next day in Mississippi.

Evers’ assassination and the murder of four young girls in the September bombing of a Birmingham church are the most publicized incidents of violence during 1963, but it was a particularly violent year, with racist attacks on blacks across the South. African-American retaliatory violence also occurred in several towns in response to Evers’ assassination.

Nonetheless, the initial call for the march had begun earlier. Concerned with economic inequality due to continuing racial discrimination, Bayard Rustin and A. Phillip Randolph had proposed a march to elevate economic issues on the movement’s agenda. Their emphasis on economic issues rather than constitutional rights suggests one of the fissures within the movement. Violence during the spring forced the organizers to move up the march’s timeframe.

We can hear King’s speech today and imagine much of the country was behind him and the movement at that point. But was that the case?

Public opinion polls and surveys conducted during the early 1960s sharply contradict that. A survey four months after the march showed 47 percent of northern whites and 63 percent of white southerners believed the civil rights movement had been “generally more violent than peaceful.” And 59 percent of northern whites and 78 percent of southern whites “generally” disapproved of the actions blacks used to acquire their civil rights.

The March on Washington, especially popular excerpts from King’s speech, created a broad-based liberal coalition that for at least two years supported King and the mainstream civil rights movement. Before that, King was regularly vilified in the mainstream press. Kennedy had not been actively supportive until the crisis at the University of Alabama. And King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” written to liberal white religious leaders, best reveals the paucity of white support before the march.

One common perception is that the March on Washington represented the high point of a unified and nonviolent civil rights movement, led solely by King, which would be eclipsed in coming years by the Black Power movement.

It is true that the march was the highpoint of the civil rights movement, but even so, it barely masked the strategic and ideological divisions within the movement. It is probably best to think of King during these years as the dominant but contested leader. The ultimate slogan for the march, “Jobs and Justice,” reflected a compromise between those focused on economic justice and those focused on public accommodations and voting. The desire to present a united front moved militants and radicals to compromise with moderates. Malcolm X criticized the march as a Kennedy administration-directed “picnic.”

Nevertheless, the civil rights movement was superseded by Black Power for both positive and negative reasons. On the one hand, after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, it had achieved much of its agenda, at least the agenda that was able to hold a large coalition together, including substantial white support. Moreover, once access to public accommodations and voting rights were won, the thornier economic, psychological and educational issues became clearer.

Black Power was as complex as it was transformative. It was a river with many currents. At its core were the principles of self-determination, racial pride and self-defense. The central practice involved building independent black-controlled institutions. The election of black political representatives; the creation of newspapers, journals and presses; the building of African-American cultural centers and museums, political parties, caucuses and professional associations, businesses, and black studies programs were all initiated through the philosophy of Black Power. Some approaches to Black Power were radical, others were moderate, and still others were conservative.

What should we see as the legacy of the march and of King’s “Dream”?

For many years, the March on Washington was the largest political rally ever held in the nation’s capital. In terms of policy, it led directly to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and indirectly to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Its actual history serves to remind us of the relationship between race and class – of the centrality of the demand for economic justice and the continuing need for a massive jobs program and a living wage. These issues resonate as loudly today as they did in 1963.

King’s speech was masterfully delivered but in many ways its soaring oratory and eloquent rhetoric overshadowed important and harder-hitting speeches that day by A. Phillip Randolph and John Lewis. At the center of the speech is a vision, an injunction to transformative action. We have to remind people that in the wake of escalating economic inequality and a resurgence of racial oppression, Dr. King’s words remain relevant. Not the rhythmic “I Have a Dream” refrain, but the call to struggle at the heart of the speech. There Dr. King contended that “America has defaulted on its promissory note,” that fighters for justice must not be seduced by the “tranquilizing drug of gradualism,” and that “legitimate discontent” demands the unleashing of “whirlwinds of revolt” that “shake the foundations” of America “until the bright day of justice emerges.”