To cap the summer's great storm of protest, the Negro leaders sponsored
the now famous March on Washington. It was a remarkable spectacle, one of
disorganized order, with a stateliness that no amount of planning could have
produced. Some 200,000 strong, whites and blacks of all ages walked from the
Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial. There, the Negro leaders
spoke--Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph, Young and SNICK's Lewis.
But it was King who most dramatically articulated the Negro's grievances,
and it was he whom those present, as well as millions who watched on
television, would remember longest. "When we let freedom ring," he cried, "when
we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every
city, we ill be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men
and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to
join hands and sing, in the words of the old Negro spiritual,
Even the Unions. The march made irreversible all that had gone before in
the year of the Negro revolution. In that year, the Negroes made more gains
than they had achieved in any year since the end of the Civil War. A speedup in
school integration in the South brought to 1,141 the number of desegregated
school districts. In the North, city after city re-examined de facto school
segregation and set up plans to redress the balance. In 300 cities in the
South, public facilities--from swimming pools to restaurants--were integrated,
and in scores of cities across the nation, leaders established biracial
committees as a start toward resolving local inequities.
New job opportunities opened nearly everywhere, as the nation's businesses
sent out calls for qualified Negro help--and, finding a shortage, began
training programs for unskilled Negroes. Banks, supermarkets, hotels and
department stores upgraded Negro employees. In Philadelphia, Cleveland and New
York, pressure on the A.F.L.-C.I.O construction unions--the most notorious Jim
Crow organizations in the North--produced progress toward training of Negro
apprentices. San Francisco's tile setters, memphis' rubber workers and St.
Louis' bricklayers opened their union rolls to willing beginners. Television
and Madison Avenue blossomed with Negro actors and ad models in "non- Negro"
roles. In Denver, Sears, Roebuck & Co., which hitherto had had one Negro
employee (dusting shelves), hired 19 more Negroes for a variety of jobs. To
varying degrees it was the same way in Houston, at Grant's five and ten, and in
San Francisco, where Tidewater Oil took on a Negro for executive training. Even
in the South, the job situation improved. Negroes began moving into
professional positions in North Carolina's state government. Three Nashville
banks agreed to hire Negroes in clerical positions, and some white-collar jobs
opened in South Carolina.
Still, for every tortuous inch gained, there are miles of progress left to
be covered. There remain 1,888 Southern school districts where segregation is
the rule--and scores of other districts where desegregation sits uneasily in
token form. Though Montgomery buses are technically integrated, the city's
other public facilities still are not. Team sports are still carefully
segregated in a large number of Southern institutions; the NBC television
network recently canceled coverage of the annual Blue-Gray football game
because Negroes are not eligible to participate. Only 22 states have
enforceable fair-employment laws on the books. And not counting Mississippi,
where there is a total absence of integrated public facilities, those in other
Southern states are so spotty and inconsistent (a downtown lunch counter, yes;
the city swimming pool, no) that it is hard for a Negro nowadays to know where
he may go and where he may not.
Backlash. In general, housing is still the Negro's toughest barrier. Here
and there--for example, in Denver's Park Hill residential section, where Negro
home buying at first created flurries of panic--colored families have been able
to move into white sections with little trouble. But the major metropolitan
areas of Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Washington and Los Angeles continue
to fill up at the heart with Negroes while whites from a suburban collar on the
outside. California used to pride itself on its progressive attitude, and
boasts a fair- housing law on the books to prove it. Now it has been struck
with a campaign by the 40,000-member California Real Estate Association to
nullify the law.
The white counterattack in California reflects one natural consequence of
the Negro's militant position: a backlash reaction, derived from the notion
that "the Negro is pushing too far, too fast," and that he is also threatening
the unskilled white man's job security. James P. Mitchell, Eisenhower's onetime
Labor Secretary, now San Francisco's human-relations coordinator and a friend
of the Negro feels that "militancy could quite easily antagonize important
people who are now prepared or preparing to do something. What Negroes have to
remember is something they tend to forget: that they are a minority, and that
they can only achieve what they want with the support of the majority." Says
Los Angeles Housewife Maureen Hartman: "I don't see why the Negroes are weeping
and wailing. This is not Birmingham. They can go anywhere. They can vote, hold
good jobs, eat in the best restaurants. Just what do they expect from us?"
