A March for Jobs and Freedom

PETER: This is BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

BRIAN: I’m Brian Balogh.

ED: And I’m Ed Ayers. This week on the show, we’re marking the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom with a closer look at what we’ve forgotten about that momentous event.

BRIAN: One of the things that a lot of people don’t realize about the 1963 march is that its story begins more than two decades earlier, in 1941. Franklin Roosevelt was just starting his third term. The US hadn’t yet entered World War II, but it was supplying equipment to the Allies. And that meant American factories were cranking out trucks, tanks, and aircraft, fueling an economic boom that helped pull the country out of the Great Depression.

ED: But that boom didn’t reach everyone. Black workers were largely denied these new manufacturing jobs, so a group of black union leaders started organizing for change. And they had two main demands. Number one, ban employment discrimination by government contractors. And number two, integrate the armed forces. And the tactic they devised to achieve these two goals was, you guessed it, a march on Washington.

BRIAN: Historian William Jones has written about this first March on Washington. He says the idea was spearheaded by longtime labor leader A. Philip Randolph, who would go on to lead the 1963 march. I asked Jones what exactly Randolph had in mind back in 1941.

WILLIAM P. JONES: He initially said the march would be 10,000 people. He emphasized that this would be African-Americans from all walks of life. And this was a really critical part of A. Philip Randolph’s sort of political strategy, that he saw mass mobilization as an effective way of changing political policy and law.

The original plan was to meet at the Capitol Building and then walk down Pennsylvania Avenue past the White House, past the War Department, which had not yet moved out to the Pentagon, and then end at the Lincoln Memorial. And the symbolism of ending at the memorial to the Great Emancipator really began at that 1941 march.

He, over the course of several months, expanded his expectations dramatically. And by the summer of 1941, he was saying that 100,000 people would be there.

BRIAN: And how many people showed up?

WILLIAM P. JONES: Well, nobody showed up because–

BRIAN: Trick question. I’m glad you’re still awake, Will.

WILLIAM P. JONES: President Roosevelt insisted from the beginning that he would not negotiate with Randolph unless Randolph called the march off first. He said, you cannot have this march. We are preparing for a war. It’s dangerous. It’s going to lead to violence. If you cancel the march, then I’ll talk to you. And Randolph always said, no, we’re going to keep marching until you actually meet our demands.

And at the last minute, Roosevelt called Randolph into the White House, and he issued an executive order banning discrimination by defense contractors. And in exchange for that, Randolph called off the march just a week before it was supposed to take part.

Now, this didn’t meet all of the demands. He did not integrate the armed forces or eliminate discrimination in the armed forces.

BRIAN: So what was different about 1963? Why does the march get put back on the front burner in that year?

WILLIAM P. JONES: Well, there’s a number of things. One is the movement in the South and the importance of this tremendous mass movement emerging in the most conservative part of the country in the 1950s, an incredibly conservative time when much of the labor movement and the civil rights movement that had emerged in the 1940s was really on its back. And the Cold War, the sort of suspicion of radicalism.

And so the importance of the movement in the South was that it demonstrated that by taking these direct action tactics, these mass mobilization strategies, they could actually effectively break the tide of this conservative period. So that was one really important difference that emerged in the late 1950s.

The other was that the movement against employment discrimination that Randolph had really taken up through this 1941 march had intensified, particularly with the growth of organized labor in the post-war period. In 1955, the AFL and the CIO, the two major labor federations, merged.

And the concern on the part of many African-Americans within the union movement was that the more conservative wing of this movement, which was the AFL, would dominate that new federation and allow segregation. There were some unions that explicitly barred African-Americans from membership. And their concern was that this would really sort of seal the fate of trying to integrate and trying to change organized labor.

And the initial thrust for reviving the March on Washington actually came from black union activists, who initially actually planned to march on the Washington headquarters of the AFL-CIO and demand integration and an end to discrimination within organized labor.

So those two sort of emerging really grassroots movements, a largely northern black labor movement and the southern civil rights movement, created a situation in which the March on Washington could be revived and very successful in the early 1960s.

BRIAN: So I have to ask you, most Americans, if you ask them about the “I Have a Dream” speech today, would not talk about jobs.

WILLIAM P. JONES: Right. Yeah. The story about Martin Luther King’s speech and the way in which it was delivered I think is important for understanding how we remember the march.

King’s speech was the 10th speech at the end of the day. He was tense because he was known as a tremendous speaker, and he was being counted on to really uplift a crowd that had been there for an entire day, standing in the sun. Many of them had traveled overnight on buses and trains to get there the day before. They were by that time really worn out. And his job was to uplift them.

BRIAN: He was the headliner.

WILLIAM P. JONES: He was. He was the follow-up, really. I mean, he was the end to really hit it out of the park. And everybody knew that he could hit it out of the park at the end.

But by the time he got on stage, everybody who was listening to him would have been very familiar about the full list of demands for jobs and freedom. There was no chance that anybody could have missed that after hearing nine speeches in which they went over and over and over again, this is jobs and freedom. We cannot achieve racial equality unless we have economic justice.

And I actually think that by the time King got on, he might have thought people hadn’t talked enough about the freedom part of it, that people hadn’t really emphasized the importance of integration, the importance of interracial cooperation, the importance of voting rights, and the issues that were really central to the movement out of which he came and that were really closest to his heart.

So I think he did emphasize those in the speech. But it was also a speech that was not aimed at being specific about making demands. It was an uplifting speech. And in that sense, it was tremendously successful. It was the perfect way to end this day of very intense, very specific political demands.

And then Bayard Rustin, in case anybody missed it, came back on stage after King’s speech and read the full list of demands. And A. Philip Randolph led everybody in a pledge to go home into their communities and uphold those demands to ensure that they were fulfilled.

So one of the important reasons that we’ve forgotten about the full spectrum of the objectives of the march is that we’ve focused only on King’s speech, which was the least specific of the 10, and allowed that speech to stand in for the entirety, not just of the March on Washington but I think the civil rights movement itself has come to be seen as encapsulated by the “I Have a Dream” speech.

BRIAN: William Jones is an historian at the University of Madison, Wisconsin. His new book is The March on Washington– Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotton History of Civil Rights.