It's Friday, the day of the week when I pass along a quotation intended to be uplifting or enlightening. Today's wise words harken back to the iconic civil rights march that reawakened the nation's conscience 59 years ago this week.
Nine years ago, our country's first African American president spoke at the 50th anniversary of the march on Washington. Barack Obama was not the only speaker on that occasion, any more than the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was the only voice raised against injustice on August 28, 1963. Still, the shorthand reference for that momentous march almost instantly became Dr. King's soaring "I Have a Dream" speech. Although the good reverend was the civil rights movement's most eloquent spokesman, he was not the organizer of that march, which was years in the making.
On August 20, 1963, at the 60th news conference of his presidency, John F. Kennedy was asked about the upcoming civil rights march. His halting answer was only vaguely supportive, noncommittal, really. It was as if JFK wanted to know how things would turn out before he declared himself.
"I think it is appropriate that these people and anyone else who feels themselves -- who are concerned -- should come to Washington, see their congressmen, and see any of us if they feel that it is in the public interest," Kennedy told reporters.
Asked if he was planning to participate himself, the president replied, "No," adding that he had been asked by the leaders of the march for a meeting at the White House and that he was "glad" to comply with that request.
Kennedy mentioned the right of marchers to express their views to Congress twice that day. But this was something of a dodge. As JFK knew, civil rights leaders had long since developed a strategy of treating the man in the Oval Office as their primary target audience. It was an approach with a weighted history, especially with presidents from the Democratic Party.
Woodrow Wilson's administration had re-segregated the federal workforce. Franklin Roosevelt had refused to insist on an anti-lynching plank in the Democratic Party convention platform despite entreaties from political supporters ranging from labor leader A. Philip Randolph to a well-situated ally: first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
It was Randolph, the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, who first came up with the idea of a march on Washington -- many years earlier. As the industrial might of the United States shifted to a wartime footing, Randolph remonstrated with FDR on the fact that black workers were being systematically shut out of jobs in the defense plants. Getting nowhere, in May 1941, Randolph issued a call for an "all out, thundering march on Washington" that would culminate in a "huge demonstration" at the Lincoln Memorial.
In June that year, as Hitler's troops rolled across Russia and Japanese aviators were training for a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt met with Randolph and other civil rights leaders, who predicted a crowd of 100,000 could assemble on the National Mall. FDR's initial response was a mildly phrased memo to the federal Office of Personnel Management encouraging the use of the full "productive power" of the U.S. workforce. Considering this an empty gesture, Randolph continued preparations for a July 1, 1941, march.
Roosevelt was worried. During the First World War, Randolph had agitated against black men serving in the armed forces of a nation that didn't grant them full equality. With America being drawn inexorably into World War II, Randolph was talking this way again. Wishing to avoid anything that could derail his delicate balancing act between an isolationist Congress and desperate Great Britain, Roosevelt issued a strongly worded executive order essentially barring Jim Crow from the defense industry. The 1941 march was cancelled. Or, maybe just postponed for 22 years.
After World War II ended, Randolph pressed his case with FDR's successor. In a letter to Harry Truman, Randolph warned that many black men would be unwilling to serve in uniform unless the armed services were integrated. At a March 22, 1948, White House meeting with Truman, attended by some 20 civil rights leaders and White House aides, Randolph stated his long-held view with uncommon bluntness.
"Mr. President," he said, "Negroes are in no mood to shoulder a gun for democracy abroad so long as they are denied democracy here at home."
Although Truman was already on record as expressing outrage at the treatment of returning black servicemen in the South, he bristled at this veiled threat.
"Mr. Randolph," replied the commander-in-chief, "I wish you hadn't made that statement."
The visiting civil rights leaders didn't back down. "When Negroes came back from the First World War … they marched down Fifth Avenue singing ‘Over There, Over There' [and] Negroes applauded them to the highest heaven," NAACP official Charles Houston told the president. "But it wasn't long before these very men were being lynched and abuse by their own white countrymen. And this is a deep sore in the heart of the Negro community and something has got to be done about it."
Truman then surprised his guests by agreeing with them and vowing to do something about it himself. Things came to a head four months later at the Democrats' nominating convention in Philadelphia. For his part, Philip Randolph picketedthe event, carrying a sign reading, "Prison is better than Jim Crow service." In 1948, however, the action was inside the hall: Hubert Humphrey issued his famous call for Democrats to emerge from the "shadow of states' rights and into the sunshine of human rights." Strom Thurmond led a "Dixiecrat" walkout.
The head of the Democratic Party had seen enough. Nine days later, President Truman issued an executive order integrating the U.S. armed forces. For some Americans, it was too little, too late. For others, it was a welcome symbol, but one that in many ways was beside the point.
Randolph and the other civil rights leaders, notably Bayard Rustin, had long maintained that segregation and economic immobility for black people were twin pillars of interrelated injustices with institutional racism as the underlying problem.
The post-war economic boom of the 1950s had largely left black people behind. It was time, Rustin told Randolph in a January 1963 letter, to revive the idea of a massive demonstration in Washington. Its theme -- and formal name -- would be "The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom." But the violence unleashed on civil rights marchers in Birmingham and elsewhere that year crystallized the focus of the march.
In a June 22 meeting at the White House, President Kennedy suggested to civil rights leaders that their August march, which would coincide with the plans of Southern senators to filibuster a voting rights bill, might be counterproductive. "We want success in the Congress, not a big show on the Capitol," Kennedy told them. Martin Luther King Jr. replied that a show of force on the mall and action in the halls of Congress were "not antagonistic alternatives."
So 59 years ago today, Americans awakened to find in their morning newspapers a statement from the "Big Ten" leaders of the march. The event was more than a demonstration, they said. It was "a living petition" conceived as an outpouringfrom millions of people, black and white, who believed "that the time has come for the government of the United States of America, and particularly for the Congress of that government, to grant and guarantee complete equality in citizenship to the Negro minority of our population."
(Besides Randolph, Rustin, and King, the others were Walter P. Reuther, head of the United Automobile Workers; John Lewis, leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; James Farmer, president of the Congress of Racial Equality; Whitney M. Young Jr., executive director of the National Urban League; Eugene Carson Blake, representing the National Council of Churches; Mathew Ahmann, executive director of the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice; and Rabbi Joachim Prinz, president of the American Jewish Congress.)
"It will be orderly, but not subservient," these leaders said of their planned demonstration. "It will be proud, but not arrogant. It will be non-violent, but not timid. It will be unified in purposes and behavior, not splintered into groups and individual competitors."
This was their collective dream, and their promise -- and it's our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.