[John Lewis 1963 speech bluntly assailed deficiencies in the civil
rights bill others were championing — but succeeded in doing so
without undermining the day’s unity.]
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THE MAKING OF JOHN LEWIS’ 1963 MARCH ON WASHINGTON SPEECH  
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David Greenberg
August 28, 1963
New York Times
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_ John Lewis' 1963 speech bluntly assailed deficiencies in the civil
rights bill others were championing — but succeeded in doing so
without undermining the day’s unity. _

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[Read John Lewis' 1963 March on Washington speech here
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-- moderator]

The tides of history sand down complex events to smooth, shiny
baubles, and the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom —
whose 60th anniversary arrives Monday, Aug. 28 — is no exception.

This oversimplification of history is at work not only with respect to
Martin Luther King’s historic speech, which decried persistent Black
poverty before dreaming of racial harmony, but also that of John
Lewis, at 23 the march’s youngest speaker. Anointed a veritable
saint before his death in 2020, Lewis was regarded back then as an
enfant terrible fronting a headstrong new generation of rebels.
Neither caricature quite captures the principled yet pragmatic Lewis,
whose 1963 speech bluntly assailed deficiencies in the civil rights
bill others were championing — but who succeeded in doing so without
undermining the day’s unity.

Lewis’s experience with his controversial speech offers us a window
onto the competing political pressures at work — the tricky context
of an evolving protest movement groping for the right mix of defiance
and accommodation. Striking such a delicate balance remains a
challenge and an imperative for protest movements pushing for social
change today.

That John Lewis even spoke at the March on Washington was something of
a fluke. Only weeks earlier, he had been tapped as chairman of the
Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, a fledgling body formed
during the lunch-counter sit-ins of 1960. Of all SNCC’s units,
Lewis’s Nashville chapter was the most thoroughly steeped in
Gandhian nonviolence, and among the Nashvillians Lewis had imbibed
those teachings most completely. After the Nashville movement forced
the city to thoroughly integrate its public facilities in May 1963,
Lewis — with his earnest, gentle demeanor and unimpeachable devotion
to peaceful methods — was a natural choice to become SNCC’s public
face.\Even as those methods led that spring to major victories in
Nashville and (more famously) Birmingham, however, discontent with the
Gandhian ways was mounting. The Birmingham campaign spawned
demonstrations in 200 cities nationwide, and while many proceeded
peacefully, some — such as in Cambridge, Md. — turned violent,
sparking fears of mass mayhem that summer.

Media commentators now spoke of the “new militancy.” King would
use this ambiguous term in his March on Washington speech. To some,
like Lewis, militance meant not a renunciation of nonviolence but an
intensification of protest, the adoption of a defiant edge. But rivals
of King’s such as Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Malcolm
X threatened that rioting would rock America’s streets if the
government didn’t act on civil rights.

Partly to stave off violence, President John F. Kennedy announced a
sweeping civil rights bill that June. At that moment, too, the
movement elders A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin were lining up
co-sponsors for the Washington march. Many of SNCC’s young radicals
balked, fearing it would be, Lewis later recalled, “a lame event,
organized by the cautious, conservative traditional power structure of
Black America.” But Lewis, an inveterate optimist, naturally
inclined to cooperate and compromise, was for it.

On June 22, Lewis — who just several years earlier had been living
with nine siblings in a shotgun shack on an Alabama farm — joined
some 30 civil rights honchos in the White House Cabinet Room to meet
with the president. Kennedy intended to dissuade them from holding the
march, which, because of the outbursts earlier that summer, he feared
might turn destructive.

Awed to be in such august company, Lewis stayed silent through the
meeting. But King, Randolph and others made clear that the march would
take place. Kennedy acquiesced and then pivoted, spending the rest of
the summer trying to turn the gathering into a rally to pass his
bill.SNCC, meanwhile, scored its own victory. Once shut out of
meetings of the major civil rights groups, it now won recognition as
one of the six main march sponsors. That meant a speaking slot for
Lewis before an audience immeasurably larger than he had ever
addressed.

Always self-effacing, Lewis believed he had been asked to speak not
because of who he was but because of the organization he led. He
wanted his remarks to reflect the views of SNCC as a whole, which
meant something more combative than he might have drafted otherwise.
SNCC’s executive secretary, James Forman, wanted the march to be
“the forum from which we articulated to the nation a militancy not
heard before from civil rights organizations.” In SNCC’s cramped
warren of rooms on Raymond Street in Atlanta, upstairs from a tailor
shop, Lewis jotted down his ideas. Nancy Stearns, a SNCC colleague,
typed up drafts and offered input, as did Forman and others.

The weekend before the march, Lewis went to New York City. Stevie
Wonder and Thelonious Monk were headlining a benefit concert at the
Apollo Theater. Lewis stayed with Rachelle Horowitz, a Rustin deputy
who lived in a union-owned cooperative in the West 20s. Her
one-bedroom flat was a hub that summer for the young activists passing
through; here, Lewis met with Eleanor Holmes, a Yale Law School
student helping Rustin organize logistics (and decades later Lewis’s
congressional colleague), and a 22-year-old Bob Dylan dropped by to
play guitar for SNCC’s Dorie Ladner.

Lewis showed his speech around. It was tough. In it, Lewis said that
SNCC “cannot wholeheartedly support the administration’s civil
rights bill,” calling it “too little and too late.” He blasted
the Justice Department for bringing charges against SNCC workers in
Albany, Ga., while failing to indict police officers who had
brutalized a local activist and his pregnant sister-in-law.

Some wanted an even sharper edge. Tom Kahn, a young socialist close to
Rustin, added a line invoking the Civil War “March to the Sea” of
Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, in which Union forces had lain waste to
Confederate rail lines, houses, and farms throughout Georgia. “We
will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way
Sherman did,” the Brooklyn-reared Kahn wrote. “We shall pursue our
own ‘scorched earth’ policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground.” As
if grasping the incongruity between his incendiary words and Lewis’s
actual beliefs, he added: “nonviolently.”

Lewis ran it by Rustin. “It’s actually terrific,” Rustin said.
“Now fold this up, John, and keep it in your pocket.”

In Washington on Tuesday, the day before the march, SNCC workers
circulated advance copies of Lewis’s speech. One made its way to
Archbishop Patrick O’Boyle of Washington, who would be giving the
invocation the next day. That night, Rustin summoned Lewis to his
hotel suite, where he explained that the archbishop was demanding
revisions. In particular he disliked a line describing “patience”
as “a dirty and nasty word.” Though irked by the outside
interference, Lewis acquiesced, considering it a minor change.

But trouble was only beginning. By Wednesday others had also lodged
objections. At the Lincoln Memorial, with crowds massing along the
Reflecting Pool, Lewis, Forman, and Courtland Cox of SNCC battled a
rotating cast of march leaders over new alterations.

Someone objected to the phrases “revolution” and the “masses”
— but Randolph, an old socialist, came to Lewis’s defense. King,
reading the line about General Sherman, said, perceptively, “John,
that doesn’t sound like you.” It was nixed. Everyone demanded that
Lewis endorse the Kennedy bill, which he agreed to do, but with
reservations he would enumerate.

Finally, Randolph appealed to Lewis’s pragmatism. “Would you young
men accommodate an old man?” he asked. “I’ve waited all my life
for this opportunity. Please don’t ruin it.”

In a vestibule within the memorial, Forman made the changes on a
little Underwood typewriter. Lewis was now focused on his delivery. He
spoke with a thick rural accent and an occasional stammer and would be
reading the freshly revised text for the first time in front of
250,000 people. From over Forman’s shoulder he implored, “Don’t
change too much!”

Pointedly, Lewis assailed the weakness of the bill’s voting rights
provisions. He faulted the omission of a permanent Fair Employment
Practices Committee to ensure job opportunities for Black people. He
criticized the bill, too, for not resurrecting what was known as Title
III of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, a section excised during legislative
sausage-making, that would have empowered
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general to sue local officials over police abuses.

Even after delivering his confrontational remarks, Lewis appreciated
and celebrated all that the march did achieve. He and the other
leaders went to the White House and then to television studios on
Wisconsin Avenue for interviews on the old Metropolitan Broadcasting
Network. On the air, Lewis, free to say whatever he wanted, sounded
more like a King acolyte than a revolutionary firebrand.

“What raised my heart,” Lewis said, “was to see hundreds and
thousands of young white people walking the streets hand in hand with
young Negroes.” The “beloved community,” he said, using a term
popular in nonviolent circles, would be realized only with “people
together, both Black and white.” The forging of a harmonious
interracial political coalition was an indispensable part of achieving
a society free of racism.

Ultimately, the march united a broad alliance to pass Kennedy’s bill
after his death, in the form of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which
banned formal racial discrimination from most spheres of public life.
But not all of the goals that Lewis articulated would be realized with
the 1964 law.

It would take a separate bill — and a separate march — in 1965 to
secure voting rights for Black Americans, and even the Voting Rights
Act’s protections would be eroded by the Supreme Court in our own
time. The federal ability to crack down on local police abuse didn’t
become law until the 1994 crime bill, and its provisions still
haven’t ended the scourge of police brutality. Employment and income
disparities between the races still mock our aspirations to full
equality. To commemorate the march after 60 years, we should
acknowledge these long-deferred goals as well as those that were
attained.Lewis reconciled SNCC’s unvarnished appraisal of the
Kennedy bill with his elders’ understanding of the political
benefits of a positive, uplifting event. The moment demanded a fierce
adherence to principle and a willingness to listen and negotiate.
Lewis exhibited both, just as he later would in his 33 years in
Congress.

Today, many Americans — activists, politicians, citizens —
struggle with whether to oppose injustices with unyielding force or to
chip away at them through pragmatic compromise. The same difficult
choices faced Lewis and the other march participants in 1963, but they
found a way forward. They benefited from a political imagination that
was morally grounded but strategically flexible, as well as the good
fortune to have a baby-faced newcomer to politics just 23 years old
— a mere child — to lead them.

* John Lewis
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* Civil Rights Act
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* Voting Rights Act of 1965
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* 1963 march on washington
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