THE NATION 1963: Civil Rights, The March's Meaning

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. It was made just as starkly clear after the march, when the civil rights leaders went to the White House to see President Kennedy.

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. From the Capitol Hill leaders, and from the President, the visitors got polite words—and polite refusals.

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. The march was informal, often formless—yet it somehow had great dignity. It had little of the sustained suspense of an astronaut shoot or a national political convention—but it built, despite moments of boredom and restlessness—to an emotion-draining climax. It was in the probable effects on the conscience of millions of previously indifferent Americans that the march might find its true meaning.

Beginning of a Dream

The march from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, a distance of about eight-tenths of a mile, had been scheduled to start at 11:30 a.m. But at least 20 minutes before then, a group of Negroes started strolling away from the Monument grounds on the way to the Memorial. Hundreds, then thousands and tens of thousands, followed. Constitution and Independence Avenues were transformed into oceans of bobbing placards. Some marchers wept as they walked; the faces of many more gleamed with happiness. There were no brass bands. There was little shouting or singing. Instead, for over an hour and a half, there was the sound of thousands of feet shuffling toward the temple erected in the name of Abraham Lincoln.

At the Memorial, the first order of business was a program of professional entertainment. Folk Singers Joan Baez, Josh White, Odetta, Bob Dylan, Peter-Paul-and-Mary rendered hymns and civil rights songs.