[The March on Washington was 59 years ago today. It’s popularly
remembered as a moderate demonstration where MLK “had a dream” —
but in fact, it was the decades-long culmination of a mass,
working-class movement against racial and economic injustice.]
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YOU’VE BEEN LIED TO ABOUT THE 1963 MARCH ON WASHINGTON  
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WILLIAM P. JONES
August 28, 2022
Jacobin
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_ The March on Washington was 59 years ago today. It’s popularly
remembered as a moderate demonstration where MLK “had a dream” —
but in fact, it was the decades-long culmination of a mass,
working-class movement against racial and economic injustice. _

Demonstrators holding placards at the March on Washington for Jobs
and Freedom, Washington DC, August 28, 1963., FPG / Archive Photos /
Getty Images

 

Despite his towering contributions to the Civil Rights Movement, A.
Philip Randolph
[[link removed]] (1889–1979)
has somehow faded from popular memory. A black trade unionist and
socialist, Randolph’s long political career started in the 1910s
(when his Harlem-based magazine the _Messenger_
[[link removed]] staked
out a pro-labor, pro-socialist position
[[link removed]]),
ran through the 1930s and ’40s (when he gained renown for leading
the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
[[link removed]] and
the first March on Washington
[[link removed]]), and
stretched well into the ’60s (when he founded the Negro American
Labor Council
[[link removed]] and
served as the official head of the 1963 March on Washington).

Randolph’s life alone rebuts the whitewashed versions of the Civil
Rights Movement and the 1963 march. Here was a man who saw the
struggle against racial oppression and economic exploitation as
intimately linked; who located the locus of change in the organized
masses rather than the upper crust; who regarded unions as a grand
instrument to bludgeon racial injustice.

As historian William P. Jones
[[link removed]] lays out in the
following interview, it was fitting that Randolph headed the August
28, 1963, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. For that march was
a union march, a mass working-class march, a march that sought
[[link removed]] not only to end Jim Crow
tyranny and racial segregation but to win a massive federal jobs
program, well-funded education and housing, and a living wage for all
workers.

Randolph had plenty of pro-labor company at the march: Cleveland
Robinson, a key organizer, was head of the New York City local of the
Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union. Addie Wyatt, a leader
of the Packinghouse Workers union in Chicago, organized a large group
to come to the march. The Garment and Auto Workers unions footed the
bill for the event’s $20,000 sound system. Martin Luther King even
originally tried out his “I Have a Dream” rhetoric at a 1961
AFL-CIO convention.

For years leading up to the March on Washington, black labor leaders
and rank-and-file workers had used their unions, as Jones puts it,
“both as vehicles of economic empowerment of black people and as
tools for fighting racism.” When they gathered on that late August
day, it was likely the largest-ever march of US union members up to
that point. The following spring, with civil rights legislation
languishing in Congress, Randolph pulled out another classic labor
trick: he threatened to call a general strike. The Civil Rights Act
passed that summer.

Jones tells this story to great effect in his 2013 book _The March on
Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights_
[[link removed]]. He spoke
with _Jacobin_‘s Shawn Gude about the first March on Washington,
the central role that black trade unionists played in the Civil Rights
Movement, and the unfulfilled promise of the 1963 March on
Washington’s radical, mass working-class vision.

SHAWN GUDE

What was A. Philip Randolph
[[link removed]] trying
to accomplish with the first March on Washington?

WILLIAM P. JONES

There were two main demands. One was the integration of the armed
forces, and the other was a prohibition on employment discrimination,
both for federal contractors and the military.

When they initiate the march, the US is not yet in the war. Franklin
D. Roosevelt is saying that we have to be the “arsenal of
democracy,” and there’s a huge flood of federal money into
contractors. The auto companies are retooling to make weapons and
airplanes, the shipbuilding industry is gearing up, etc. But black
people are being shut out of these jobs.

A student activist movement gears up in protest against the draft:
people are saying, _I’m not going to sign up and get drafted into a
Jim Crow army_. And that gives Randolph the sense that there could be
this mass mobilization along the lines of the anti-colonial movement
in India. He’s saying, _We can bring a hundred thousand people to
Washington in the midst of the preparation for the war_,_ and that
will force the hand of the government_.

 

SHAWN GUDE

It’s really striking, looking back, how threatening that was
perceived. Thousands of people demonstrating in Washington is kind of
old hat at this point, but it certainly was not back then.

WILLIAM P. JONES

It was a big deal. In ’63, it was seen as a real threat, but
especially in ’41, people freaked out. The NAACP’s Roy Wilkins was
like, _No way, we can’t do that — it’s going to backfire,
it’s going to create rioting_.

There had been rioting during the war. There was a streetcar protest
in Washington, DC, where Southern elected officials had encouraged
soldiers to beat up protestors. There was the memory of the Bonus
March
[[link removed]],
which ended in troops being called out and beating everybody up and
burning down the Bonus Army village. People pointed to the fascist
March on Rome.

A March on Washington Movement flyer, 1941. (Library of Congress)

So there was a combination of paranoia and hyperbole, and then a real
threat of violence.

FDR tried ignoring the movement — he said, _If I meet with you, it
would show that this mob politics works_. He sent Eleanor Roosevelt
and New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia to try to talk people out
of the march. Then he finally caved and met half their demand: he
prohibited employment discrimination by contractors and created the
Fair Employment Practices Committee.

This definitely raised Randolph’s stature and gave him something to
point to and say, _Look, this works_. We didn’t even have to march
and we got this, so it’s effective.

A lot of people involved in the march were actually pissed that he
called it off, because they were ready to go. But it’s not clear how
many people would’ve showed up, so I think that was part of his
calculation. He recognized that if they showed up with like fifty
thousand people, it would still be a lot, but it would be only half of
what they had said.

SHAWN GUDE

By this point, there’s an ascendant strain of black politics —
exemplified by Randolph — that sees the black working class as the
primary driver of change. That’s a real shift from earlier, more
elite-driven brands of black politics — Booker T. Washington
[[link removed]]–style
conservatism being the most famous, but even W. E. B. Du Bois’s idea
of the “Talented Tenth
[[link removed]].” Could you talk
about the mass, working-class, black politics embodied by Randolph’s
1941 March on Washington? And how did the March on Washington
Movement’s relative success affect people’s sense of mass politics
as a possible strategy going forward?

WILLIAM P. JONES

As I said, a lot of people in the leadership of the NAACP and
the Urban League
[[link removed]] remained
very committed to the idea that the way to fight for racial equality
was through a kind of respectability politics —demonstrating that
black people could be just as educated and behave like white people
supposedly did.

The NAACP was committed to working through the courts and through
access to elected officials, and Roy Wilkins was very suspicious of
the idea that you could win anything through demonstrations and the
like. Disruptive mass movements, the idea that working people were
going to be at the forefront of change — he saw that as naive.

 

Randolph’s position was that mass politics is the way the vast
majority of black people can get involved in the movement.

So it’s important to recognize that what Randolph was saying was
still controversial. He was a radical. Randolph’s position was that
mass politics is the way the vast majority of black people can get
involved in the movement. He saw it as a way of building a biracial
working-class movement.

The real thrust of this new mass politics was coming from two sources.
One was young, college-educated, black radicals, mostly women: Ella
Baker
[[link removed]], Pauli
Murray
[[link removed]], Dorothy
Height
[[link removed].], Bayard
Rustin
[[link removed]].
They’re pointing to the anti-colonial movement in India as a model.

And people are like, _Well, India is still a colony and the movement
there is getting beat up_. It is a majority movement that’s trying
to get rid of this tiny British minority — it doesn’t apply to the
United States. If you do it here, it is going to get people killed.
And that’s what happened: when Bayard Rustin started these bus rides
[the original Freedom Rides
[[link removed]] of
the 1940s], he got beat to hell and thrown in jail.

 

This mass approach is very controversial. The NAACP and the Urban
League are really hesitant to get involved.

So this mass approach is very controversial. The NAACP and the Urban
League are really hesitant to get involved in the March on Washington
’41. They do it at the last minute, only when it’s clear that
it’s going to bring a significant group of people to the Capitol.

The other force that’s really important is the black working class
— people who are involved in the labor movement during the Second
World War, mostly in the CIO
[[link removed]]. It’s people in
the autoworkers’ union, in the needle trades’ unions, in the
warehouse and packinghouse workers’ unions
[[link removed]].
They take leadership in the movement, and they become the base of the
NAACP, sort of in spite of the NAACP’s leadership.

SHAWN GUDE

Your book provides a wonderful account of labor’s foundational role
in the Civil Rights Movement in these years. I was wondering if you
could talk about that rich labor ecosystem — unions like
the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
[[link removed]] and
figures like Cleveland Robinson
[[link removed]] and Addie
Wyatt [[link removed]] — which
we don’t hear about anymore, but was responsible for pushing a black
working-class politics.

WILLIAM P. JONES

These are people who came of age in the late ’30s, early ’40s,
mostly in CIO unions, and they’re exposed to a wing of the union
movement that’s deeply committed to interracial cooperation and
anti-racism. They’re not naive about it — they’re often fighting
within their unions against white leaders resistant to challenging
racism. But they see a strong possibility for using unions both as
vehicles of economic empowerment of black people and as tools for
fighting racism.

United Packinghouse Workers at a Chicago parade, circa 1960. (Chicago
Public Library)

That idea was hard to have faith in before the CIO. But they came up
with that [“civil rights unionism
[[link removed]]“]
being a real possibility, and they ran with it. In places like Detroit
and Chicago and New York, black people could rise into significant
positions of power within the union movement, and that made a huge
difference.

They’re also deeply connected to the NAACP — as I said before, in
some ways they take over the NAACP. That creates the basis of a mass
movement that facilitates the ’41 March, and really, in the ’50s
and ’60s, becomes a significant driving force of the Civil Rights
Movement.

They’re raising funds in all the big Northern cities and sending
them down to Montgomery and New Orleans and Birmingham and other
places where local movements are developing. Those movements
wouldn’t have taken off without that kind of support.

SHAWN GUDE

Can you talk more about the Sleeping Car Porters? I guess this is
becoming a major theme of our conversation, but it’s sort of amazing
how forgotten they are given the central role they played in the
movement.

WILLIAM P. JONES

Sleeping car porters were based in cities all over the country and
were connected because of their work on the trains. They became these
sort of communication networks, circulating information along the
rails and building community bases of support. Women’s clubs were an
important part of this movement — the Sleeping Car Porters had
a women’s auxiliary
[[link removed]] that allied with
the National Council of Negro Women and the YWCA.

So there are these community-based organizations that are able to
mobilize, and you see that in every single place where there’s an
upturn in civil rights mobilization in the ’50s. It’s based in
these networks that had been built up since the 1920s.

 

In almost all of the big cities, there are people who come out of the
Sleeping Car Porters that are important civil rights leaders.

What’s funny about the sleeping car porters is that, by the ’50s,
it’s sort of a dying industry. The auto industry is taking off, and
you have the airline industry too. But the union has the funds and,
importantly, this national network that is able to mobilize and keep
going. In a lot of ways, the growing industrial unions
[[link removed]] became
more important to the movement, but the Sleeping Car Porters created a
model that a lot of activists in those industrial unions followed. And
it becomes this sort of glue, and even as it’s running into hard
times, it’s created this leadership cadre — people like Randolph,
like E. D. Nixon,
[[link removed]] who led the
movement in Montgomery.

In almost all of the big cities, there are people who come out of the
Sleeping Car Porters that are important civil rights leaders.

SHAWN GUDE

You mentioned the important role that women played in the Sleeping Car
Porters, but often women were sort of pushed to the side in the
movement, including being excluded from the leadership of the 1963
March on Washington. Can you talk about some of that exclusion?

WILLIAM P. JONES

It’s complex. After the ’41 march was called off, the fight for
fair employment did focus a lot on women’s jobs, largely because the
civil rights organizations walked away from it, and the ones that kept
going were the National Council of Negro Women and the YWCA. They
explicitly shift and say, _Women are getting jobs during the war. We
need to have a campaign to fight to keep those jobs._

So there are a lot of cases in which women are in leadership, it’s
just that the top leadership isn’t recognizing them, and often
explicitly trying to push them out. The male leadership of the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters is really explicit in saying that
there are too many women involved.

Ella Baker in 1964. (Wikimedia Commons)

But in spite of that, women are often pushing the movement in
directions that it wouldn’t have gone. It’s women — Pauli
Murray
[[link removed]] probably
being the most important — who bring the idea of Gandhian
nonviolence into practice.

Or look at someone like Ella Baker
[[link removed]],
who consciously avoided the spotlight and was like, _I don’t want
to be a leader, I want people to help people lead themselves_.
That’s actually extremely effective leadership, but it’s one that
does not get recognized. So I think that combination of working in the
trenches, doing the hard work, and then the blatant sexism, meant that
they often didn’t get recognized for the leadership they were doing.

SHAWN GUDE

Let’s talk about the ’63 March on Washington. Obviously, the most
remembered part is Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
But that omits a lot about the event. I was wondering if you could
talk about the march, which explicitly paired the fight against Jim
Crow with the fight for economic justice.

WILLIAM P. JONES

There are a couple things I would emphasize. One is the painstaking
attention to the message — how it was articulated and how it would
be projected. Bayard Rustin insisted they get this $20,000 sound
system because he said that if people in the back can’t hear,
they’re not going to be engaged. They had this whole security system
within the march to try to dissuade people from getting into arguments
and fights — the Nazi Party was there, taunting people, trying to
cause trouble. So there was this very meticulous attention to getting
the message out and preserving the image of the march.

Just getting people there was a tremendous endeavor. It was a weekday,
so people had to take off work. Most people came from big Northern
cities, and the unions often would hire trains. For most people, they
were on the train or the bus overnight.

Bayard Rustin and Cleveland Robinson ahead of the 1963 March on
Washington. (Wikimedia Commons)

King’s speech came at the end of this really long day. He was
purposely trying to get people’s spirits up, trying to rally people
before the end. What’s tragic about the way we remember the march
— because they went to such extents to make sure everybody knew what
the march was about — is that King’s was the least specific speech
about the goals of the march.

 

The speeches were really specific about the connection between
economic justice and racial equality.

Flyers were printed up with instructions on attending the march, then,
really boldly, the demands of the march. Then they read out the
demands at the beginning and at the end, and the speeches were really
specific about the connection between economic justice and racial
equality.

There was a lot of grumbling after the March that the media didn’t
pay attention to the economic demands, but at the moment, it was
pretty unavoidable. The full thing was broadcast on radio and on
television. Newspapers were there. It’s only over time that the
image of the march was narrowed down, and that colorblindness was seen
as the main goal of the march, which it was not at all.

SHAWN GUDE

I was kind of astounded to learn in your book that in the spring of
1964, several months after the march, and with the civil rights bill
still stuck in Congress, Randolph called for what was effectively a
general strike. Could you talk about the aftermath of the march, and
how the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was finally passed?

WILLIAM P. JONES

A couple things about the Civil Rights Act are important to remember.
John F. Kennedy introduced that bill in the summer of 1963, and he was
adamant that it should not have the fair employment provision. He
thought that would alienate Northern Republicans who might otherwise
support a bill focused on voting rights, integration of schools, etc.
An important part of the march was that they wanted to add an Fair
Employment Practices Committee provision to the bill. And that’s
what the march did.

There’s this idea that the march sort of convinced white people that
they had been too hard on black people and, you know, that black
people were okay. That’s obviously wrong. But it did convince people
like George Meany and Hubert Humphrey — liberals within this
coalition — that they had to support this kind of thing, and that
they could actually get these fair employment provisions. So the fact
that after the march, this coalition came together to pass the bill
and keep those provisions in is really important — many people would
see what’s now Title VII of the Civil Rights Act as the core of the
law, but that was not at all Kennedy’s intention.

 

Randolph was like, we need to up the ante. Let’s call for a general
strike. And they probably could’ve pulled it off.

In terms of the effects of the march and the next few months, it’s
important to remember there was a lot of frustration. It wasn’t
clear the law was going to pass. It was being filibustered. And
that’s the remarkable moment at which Randolph was like, we need to
up the ante. Let’s call for a general strike. And they probably
could’ve pulled it off.

The Negro American Labor Council [the organization Randolph founded in
1960] had people in positions of power in all the major industrial
unions in all the major cities and in the public-sector unions as
well. They could have shut down a few big cities.

The filibuster ended pretty quickly after he called that. I don’t
know if that was people recognizing it was a realistic threat or other
things, but it certainly showed both the importance of the employment
provisions and the power that organized black workers had within the
movement.

SHAWN GUDE

What is the March on Washington’s legacy, and what does it tell us
about current fights against economic exploitation and racial
injustice?

WILLIAM P. JONES

If I would point to one thing, it’s the idea that racial equality is
impossible without economic justice. That motivated Randolph for his
entire career, and it was the central message of the march:
desegregation. Equal treatment based upon race is important, is
fundamental, but it’s not going to be substantive without guaranteed
access to decent jobs and union protections. These things are integral
to the fight for racial equality.

The thing I find particularly frustrating about the memory of the
march is that it is seen as this moderate, watered-down, defanged
movement — when I think it’s actually the moment at which that
political message was delivered most effectively by working people.
Philip Foner pointed out that it was probably the biggest march of
union members in American history up to that point.

It was a union march. And it was a march of working people demanding
economic justice and saying that it is integral to the struggle for
racial equality.

SHAWN GUDE

You have a great part in the epilogue where you write, “Ironically,
frustration with the failure to realize the more radical goals of the
March on Washington led some to suggest that its agenda had never been
so ambitious.”

WILLIAM P. JONES

Yeah, there’s an incredible position that emerges, I think, in the
’80s and ’90s that the march was successful because it was
moderate. That’s just insane. There’s absolutely no truth to that.
It’s actually the reverse. It was successful because it was
expansive in its demands, and because it was radical and militant.
That’s a really important lesson that often gets overlooked or lost.

I also think we should make clear the present connection between the
struggle for racial equality and for economic justice — between the
sort of new union movement and the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s
important to see them as intimately aligned, and that’s an important
legacy of the march.

 

Philip Foner pointed out that it was probably the biggest march of
union members in American history up to that point.

We’ve seen this during the pandemic and the racial inequalities in
the workforce. The people who were most likely to be seen as essential
workers are underpaid, disempowered, and tend to be people of color.
Race and class are deeply intertwined.

And we saw this union movement emerge from frontline workers at places
like Amazon
[[link removed]] who
were deeply affected and who were largely people of color. I think
people should be conscious of the fact that that’s a constant in
American history, and that it has deeply shaped the union movement and
the Left.

_WILLIAM P. JONES is a professor of history at University of
Minnesota. He is the author of The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom
and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights and The Tribe of Black
Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South._

_SHAWN GUDE is a senior editor at Jacobin. He is currently writing a
biography of Eugene Debs._

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* U.S. history
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* race
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* Labor
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* Black workers
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* Women
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* civil rights movement
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* March on Washington
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* A Philip Randolph
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* Civil Rights Act
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* Martin Luther King
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