The Civil Rights Movement by Bruce J. Dierenfield;

Author:Bruce J. Dierenfield;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Unlimited)
Published: 2021-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

10 Let freedom ring

To compel President John Kennedy to do something about the “snail-like pace of desegregation in the South,” Martin Luther King embraced what he called the movement’s “greatest weapon”—mass demonstration. The idea of a huge rally in Washington to push for federal government help had first surfaced when Coxey’s “army” protested widespread unemployment in the 1890s. During World War II, the idea was advanced by A. Philip Randolph, a black socialist, and King contacted the movement’s “grand old man” to see if all parties could work together to claim their rights. Randolph was glad to cooperate, though his focus was different. Black unemployment, he noted, was more than twice the rate for whites, and a typical black family earned about half what an average white family did. Compounding these economic problems was the systematic disfranchisement of many blacks, making democracy a cruel hoax to them. Working with Bayard Rustin, the movement’s best organizer, Randolph suggested that a national gesture for economic reform could prod politicians to double the minimum wage and create a large federal jobs program. In the spring of 1962, Randolph proposed two days of lobbying and sit-ins at Capitol Hill and ending with a large rally at the Lincoln Memorial. By transforming the civil rights struggle from a regional to a national campaign, the massive demonstration for equal rights and economic equality would be the movement’s high-water mark and the greatest demonstration for freedom in American history.

Other civil rights leaders had reservations about the plan. The NAACP’s Roy Wilkins opposed a march as too expensive and too ineffectual in influencing legislation. Wilkins had reluctantly supported the formation of three modest rallies in Washington for voting rights and school desegregation in the late 1950s, but believed they had produced no concrete results. Randolph intimated that any new march would be tainted by Rustin’s homosexuality, former membership in the Young Communist League, and imprisonment for resisting the draft for the Korean War. Wilkins overlooked Rustin’s international organizing experience and his contributions to CORE and SCLC. The Urban League’s Whitney Young Jr. worried that his organization’s tax-exempt status would be jeopardized by backing a political event. For John Lewis, chairman of the comparatively radical SNCC, a march was just the beginning. To challenge a foot-dragging government, he proposed paralyzing Washington with camp-ins on the White House lawn, lie-ins across airport runways, and sit-ins in Congress and the Justice Department.

These reservations from competing civil rights groups forced a compromise, as did the sheer size of the event, the necessity to cooperate with government officials, and the implementation of a mass marketing campaign. All major civil rights leaders, including Wilkins, signed on, provided the purpose be changed to “jobs and freedom” and Randolph be named the march’s director. Randolph accepted the draft and promptly named Rustin deputy director. For the first time, all major civil rights leaders and organizations set aside their squabbling to collaborate on a national undertaking for racial justice. But the economic goals Randolph long favored took second

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