To commemorate its role in the planning and execution of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference has published a book that goes behind the scenes of the Civil Rights Movement to capture the drama of that great day.
The organization, then headed by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was prominent among the groups who united to plan what became one of the largest, peaceful, mass demonstrations for civil rights and economic justice ever. The fact that an estimated quarter of a million or more people, blacks, whites, and others, came together on Aug. 28, 1963, to stand for freedom and progress was no small undertaking.
This book, “I Have a Dream: A 50th Year Testament to the March That Changed America,” (by SCLC, Pearson, $49.99), not only documents that day but also gives a succinct history of the long struggle before and after that day to make America deliver on the promise of freedom.
“The road to a cause or purpose begins with a need to fix an injustice,” the book says. “For African Americans, it was a journey that had to be made – one that no one could make for them, and one that would be made against opposition, and because of opposition.”
With informative text and evocative photographs, the book outlines the history of oppression that produced the determination and frustration that brought African Americans, along with a throng of allies, to the capital to stand witness to the need for change. The book includes essays and a timeline that trace the history of slavery, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement and the march.
Part of that timeline that is not commonly known or discussed but cited here is how A. Philip Randolph, the labor leader, and Bayard Rustin, the pacifist agitator for civil rights, had planned to convene such a march 12 years earlier. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, alarmed that an attendance of 100,000 was predicted, asked them to call it off, but they declined, according to the book. Roosevelt responded by issuing an executive order banning discrimination in federal jobs and the defense industries. The organizers called off the1941 march after the mere threat of it produced a favorable result.
The modern Civil Rights Movement did not begin in earnest until more than a dozen years later, with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1954. Victory there inspired other boycotts and led to the organization in 1957 of what became the SCLC, under the leadership of King, as an umbrella group to coordinate nonviolent civil-rights efforts throughout the segregationist South.
