Public Employee Press

The March 1963-2013
Architects of the 1963 march

The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was the brainchild of two labor leaders, Asa Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, who worked with churches and civil rights groups to produce a monumental demonstration for social change.

Both Randolph and Rustin were men of conscience, who experienced injustice at the hands of the American system and stood up to the leaders of the time to demand social and economic equality.

As advisors to a young Martin Luther King Jr., who became a central figure in the civil rights movement, they lived by and used nonviolence to press for change and implemented strategic organization of ordinary people to accomplish extraordinary work.

Randolph in 1925 organized African American railway workers into the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. When blacks could not get jobs in the defense industry, he took steps to organize a march on Washington to pressure President Franklin D. Roosevelt to ban discrimination. When the president conceded to Randolph's demands in 1941, he called off the march. In 1948, the brilliant organizer pressed President Harry S. Truman to end racial segregation in the U.S. military, and won.

Rustin was a pacifist who was imprisoned because he would not go to war and kill his fellow man, nor would he work in alternative service to help the war effort. Black and gay, he was honest about who he was and that zeal for truth motivated him to hold the nation accountable for its duplicity: promising freedom but limiting dignity, rights and opportunities for even the most basic of human needs to its white male citizens.

Rustin became a mentor to Dr. King, introducing him to the teachings of Ghandi that marked the demonstrations of peaceful civil disobedience, boycotts and sit-ins.

They planned the midweek march with the idea that it would garner enough attention to arouse the national conscience because of the sacrifices made in order to attend. The new media of the time, television, helped publicize and bear witness to the 20th-century American revolution.

No compromise

March organizers had no idea who would show up. They expected about 10,000 and would have been happy with 100,000 protesters. That 250,000 people, men, women, students, Blacks and whites, came was simply astonishing and has not been repeated.

On that hot August day in muggy Washington, D.C., Rustin read a list of demands for "an effective Civil Rights legislation, no compromise, no filibuster, and that it include public accommodations, decent housing, integrated education under the Fair Employment Practices Commission, and include the right to vote; the withholding of Federal funds from all programs in which discrimination exists; an end to segregation in every school district in the year 1963; enforcement of the 14th Amendment, the reducing of congressional representation of states where citizens are disenfranchised; an Executive Order banning discrimination in all housing supported by Federal funds; that every person in this nation, black or white, be given training and work with dignity to defeat unemployment and automation; an increase in the national minimum wage so that men may live in dignity, and that all of the rights that are given to any citizen be given to black men and men of every minority group."

In a pledge Randolph then charged the throngs of peaceful protestors to "not relax until victory is won and to carry the message of the March to friends and neighbors, to demonstrate and to vote so that every voice is heard."

—D. S. Williams