Public Employee Press


Book review
Marching in Washington, 2013: We Still Have a Dream

On Saturday, Aug. 24, hundreds of DC 37 members marched to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the historic 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, when the Rev. Martin Luther King's magnificent "I Have a Dream" speech electrified the marchers and the nation.

The 1963 demonstration demanded civil rights in the South and in the North as well as economic rights, as King reminded us when he spoke of African Americans inhabiting "an island of poverty in a sea of abundance."

In his new book, "The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom," author William Jones reminds us that a union president, A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, first called for the 1963 march to support the struggle in the South and focus on the broad economic issues that impacted African Americans.

In 1941 Randolph had organized for a march on Washington to push President. Franklin D. Roosevelt to end job discrimination in industries with war production contracts. Roosevelt created his Fair Employment Practices Commission by Executive Order and Randolph called off that march but organized protests nationwide to press FDR to enforce the FEPC's non-discrimination rules.

After World War II Randolph demanded a law to end employment discrimination and called for the 1963 march to pressure President John F. Kennedy. He linked the issues of civil rights with economic rights for full employment, ending job discrimination and raising the minimum wage and having it cover farm workers, domestic workers and public employees.

In the 1963 march, a broad coalition of all the major civil rights organizations joined with the progressive unions, including DC 37 and its parent national union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, in the biggest demonstration on the Capital Mall to date of over 250,000. With that momentum, President Lyndon Johnson was able to convince Congress to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawing race and gender discrimination in workplaces and public accommodations and the 1965 Voting Rights Act and to launch his War on Poverty.

Fifty years later, we marched in recognition of the achievements of the 1963 demonstration and with the understanding that our civil and economic rights are rapidly deteriorating. The New Jim Crow, voting rights reversals and attacks on job-creating policies, workers' wages, union rights, health care and even food stamps are creating a sweatshop economy that calls on us for the kind of fightback we mounted in the 1930s and 1960s.

The Jones book and many others about the civil rights movement are available for members to borrow free from the DC 37 Education Fund Library, which has reopened in Room 211 at union headquarters.

—Ken Nash
DC 37 Ed Fund Library, Room 211