By Edwin Cooney
Last Wednesday was the fiftieth anniversary of the 1963
March on Washington for jobs and freedom.
The march was conceived by A. Philip Randolph. Randolph opened the ceremony which was attended by an estimated
200,000 people and viewed on television by millions more.
A lot of Americans including Senator Strom Thurmond of South
Carolina (then a Democrat who became a Republican when the party abandoned
civil rights as a worthy issue), Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona (who would
receive the Republican presidential nomination in 1964), Malcolm X (who
referred to the march as “the farce on Washington"), and a
seventeen-year-old know-it-all by the name of Edwin Cooney didn’t think the
march was either necessary or that it would ultimately be significant.
Last Wednesday, fifty years later, a whole mess of people
(some of the most prominent Republicans and Conservatives) still felt that the
original march and especially last Wednesday’s celebration were not only
unnecessary and insignificant, but downright nettlesome. I heard a local Conservative talk show
host categorize President Obama’s address as “a brilliantly arranged plate of
crap.”
I, who now believe that it all did matter, celebrated in
part by listening to a recording of the original ceremony. The first voice on my recording is that
of A. Philip Randolph. (Asa was
his given first name.) He was a
remarkable man. Born in 1889 in
Crescent City, Florida, Randolph was an early labor union organizer. The son of a Baptist preacher, he spoke
the English language as you’d imagine an Old Testament prophet would have done
had Old Testament prophets spoken English. Randolph was 74 years old. Standing
on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that day, he said in his deep rich voice
to the estimated 200,000 people who were gathered there:
“We are not a pressure group. We are not a mob. We are
the advanced guard of a massive moral revolution for jobs and freedom. This
revolution reverberates throughout the land touching every city, every town,
and every village where black men are segregated, oppressed, and exploited. But
this revolution is not confined to the negro or civil rights. For our white
allies know that they can not be free while we are not. And we know that we
have no future in a society in which six million people, black and white, are
unemployed and millions more are living in poverty...”
The 1963 March on Washington for jobs and freedom wasn’t the
first march on Washington that Randolph had conceived. Back in 1941, Randolph, who was then
president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, had threatened such a
march if President Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t do something about racial
discrimination in war industries.
So, he and Walter White, then the president of The Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, paid the thrice-elected president a little visit. In exchange for not exposing what would
have been an embarrassing sign that America, even in a milder form, shared with
Hitler’s Germany an abiding human prejudice, FDR agreed to sign Executive Order
8802 which was called the Fair Employment Act. The act, however, merely banned discriminatory hiring
practices against blacks by firms profiting from federal war production
contracts.
After Randolph, John Lewis spoke. He was then chairman of
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Just 23 at the time, Lewis would be severely beaten on
“Bloody Sunday” (March 7th, 1965), as he and Hosea Williams led 600
demonstrators across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in the first leg of a proposed
march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
He currently represents the people of Georgia’s 5th
Congressional District and is the only speaker of that occasion still living.
Lewis was followed by Whitney M. Young Jr., Executive
Director of the Urban League.
Young would go on to serve as president of the National Association of
Social Workers (NASW) and to work productively for three presidents: Kennedy,
Johnson, and Nixon. Young died on
March 11th, 1971 while swimming in Lagos, Nigeria. President Nixon
not only sent a plane to bring his body back to his home in Kentucky, but he
also eulogized Young at his funeral.
During that eulogy, the president said, “[Whitney Young] knew how to
accomplish things that other people were merely for.”
Roy Wilkins, Executive Director of the NAACP (National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People), next urged the Congress to
be as brave as civil rights marchers, as daring as the nine black children who
integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas back in 1957 and as
forthright on civil rights issues as North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford --
although he didn't specifically mention Sanford by name.
Then it was Dr. Martin Luther King’s turn -- and men and
women all over the world have had a dream ever since.
Dr. King was followed by Bayard Rustin, the Executive
Director of the Congress of Racial Equality. As a gay man, Rustin wasn’t welcome by some within the civil
rights leadership. A. Philip
Randolph had conceived of the March on Washington, but Rustin had organized
it. Still, according to one source
I read, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP resisted Rustin getting any publicity at all
for the event.
The Reverend Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, who had served as
president of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia since 1940, closed the
ceremony. His most famous student
was Martin Luther King. Therefore,
it was fitting that Dr. Mays not only closed the ceremony, but also delivered
the eulogy at Dr. King’s funeral on April 6th, 1968.
Despite the passage of legislation knocking down the legal
barriers blocking the realization of a myriad of human rights and opportunities
since that historic occasion, there are those who will insist that such
legislation had nothing to do with the March on Washington for jobs and
freedom. Furthermore, they will
insist that the march shouldn't have mattered, since the prosperity of a free
people is none of the government’s business. At the same time, there are those who will trivialize the
significance of both yesterday’s and today’s gatherings because there are so
many gains yet to be made.
Hence, whether either yesterday or today really matters is
ultimately up to us. That means
you and me!
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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