Civil Rights: The March's Meaning

The march on Washington was a triumph. But after everybody agreed on that, the question was: Why?

Hardly in terms of immediate results, since there were none. The battle cry of the march was "Now!" Seas of placards demanded Negro equality—Now! Speakers demanded action—Now! Cried John Lewis, 25, leader of the militant young Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNICK): "We want our freedom—and we want it NOW!"

But Now! remained a long way off. It would not come today, tomorrow, next month or next year. This was made starkly clear as the leaders of civil rights organizations paid morning calls on Capitol Hill's most powerful citizens—Senate Democratic Leader Mike Mansfield, House Speaker John McCormack, Senate and House Republican Leaders Everett Dirksen and Charles Halleck. It was made just as starkly clear after the march, when the civil rights leaders went to the White House to see President Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon Johnson.

The Demand. To all, the civil rights leaders made specific requests: they demanded passage of the Kennedy Administration's entire civil rights package, including its controversial section banning discrimination in public accommodations. But even the Kennedy package was inadequate: the Negro leaders wanted to add to it sections that would 1) set up a federal fair employment practices commission, and 2) give the Justice Department vast power to intervene in almost all civil rights disputes throughout the land.

From the Capitol Hill leaders, and from the President and the Vice President, the visitors got polite words—and polite refusals. And as they left Washington they knew that there would be no FEPC, no authorization for the Justice Department to step into every sort of civil rights case. Most frustrating of all, they knew that the public-accommodations section of the Administration's package was quite unlikely to pass the Senate.

Wherein, then, lay the triumph of the march? Civil rights leaders themselves had a hard time putting it into words. "We subpoenaed the conscience of the nation," said Martin Luther King Jr. "We have developed a new unity among the leadership of the civil rights movement," declared A. Philip Randolph. "It is the first step in the building of a coalition of conscience," said Walter Reuther. "It did something for Negroes to see white people there with them, and not in any condescending relation," said the N.A.A.C.P.'s Roy Wilkins.