On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, blog readers may enjoy a recollection below of yours truly who was at the March on Washington but missed the King "I Had a Dream" speech.
Mitchell’s Musings
9-17-12: March on Washington
Daniel J.B. Mitchell
Recently, I came across a recording of a 1963 radio
broadcast made a day after the August 28, 1963 March on Washington, an event
which most people identify with Martin Luther King’s “I Had a Dream”
speech. Since August 28th of this year
has come and gone, you could say that this musing is about three weeks
late. But next year on August 28th,
there will undoubtedly be commemorations of the fiftieth anniversary of the
March. So you could also say this musing
is over eleven months early. Either way,
when the fiftieth anniversary comes, you will hear or see clips of the “I Had a
Dream” speech – probably just the end of the speech - which will be represented
as the entire event itself or even the purpose of the event.[1] Such interpretations will be incorrect.
I will come back to the broadcast later in this musing,
although it explains what I have just asserted, but first some background. The March on Washington took place well
before the 1964 Civil Rights Act (and other major civil rights legislation) was
enacted including Title 7 banning employment discrimination. At the time, despite the 1954 U.S. Supreme
Court’s Brown school desegregation decision, segregation was still very much in
place in the south. You had only to
drive south from Washington, DC to encounter Whites Only signs on restaurants
in Virginia. Newspaper ads for
apartments in Washington newspapers specified the desired race of tenants. The issue of segregation was still in flux,
despite the court decisions and sporadic incidents and demonstrations that
received national attention.
The Kennedy administration was not thrilled with the
prospect of the March on Washington. The
March was in fact meant to pressure it and the Congress for legislation and
action. At the time, the south had not flipped
from being solidly Democratic to solidly Republican.[2] Kennedy, as a Catholic, already had religion
problems in the south which were compounded by federal attempts to enforce
anti-segregation court orders. And the
1964 presidential election, which Kennedy would not live to see, was
looming.
Recall that Kennedy had won very narrowly in 1960 with a
plurality (not a majority) of the popular vote and uncertainty on the morning
after Election Day as to whether he even had the necessary Electoral College
votes.[3] He would need at least some
southern votes in 1964. So the
administration would have preferred not to have a large demonstration
highlighting the race issue on its front lawn.
I happened to be in Washington during the summer of 1963
between my junior and senior years in college, working at the U.S. Bureau of
Labor Statistics (BLS). The job was the
outcome of a program promoted by the Kennedy administration to encourage
college students to consider careers in public service. After a competitive interview and essay
process, if selected, you would be randomly selected to work in this or that
government agency; I happened to be assigned as a GS-4 to BLS in a division
that produced “wage chronologies.” Wage
chronologies were BLS bulletins that summarized union wage provisions in major
industries, the product of an era in which union wage settlements were
considered to be important economic developments that needed to be tracked.
Most government agencies in Washington, including the BLS,
were shut down on the day of the March, so I was free to attend. But it has always been a family joke that I
left before King’s dream speech. I did
hear it on the car radio driving back to a boarding house at which I was
staying in northern Virginia in the $100 car I had acquired over the summer.[4]
The broadcast to which I referred at the outset was made by
Jean Shepherd, a night time humorist and story teller on a New York City radio
station.[5] However, Shepherd devoted most of his August 29, 1963 broadcast to
a serious recounting his experience as a marcher. Excerpts from that broadcast
have appeared elsewhere but the full recording is available.[6] A vast
collection of recordings from Shepherd’s radio broadcasts have been gathered on
archive.org. (You have to search
diligently under Jean Shepherd to find them all since the search engine on
archive.org isn’t great and the recordings are scattered on that site.) Many of the recordings appear to be from
tapes made by fans that were recorded live off the air. They are not of broadcast quality and have
hums and background noise. The August
29, 1963 broadcast is one of those audios available.
What the Shepherd broadcast makes clear is that the
presentations on a platform at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963 were not
the key to what happened or intended to be.
The gathering itself was the key because it brought together a vast
crowd of people from many parts of the country.
The logistics of getting people to and from Washington, and taking care
of them while they were in Washington, were complex and much could have gone
wrong – but didn’t. Given the size of
the crowd, most attendees were nowhere near the Lincoln Memorial. Acoustics were not great. And the actual program of speakers and
presentations was nowhere near as organized as the logistics just mentioned.
Indeed, my impression is that the presentations were rather
disorganized. I don’t recall there being
an actual schedule of who would speak when, or at least no such schedule was
disseminated. Exactly who would talk
when was unclear. And there seemed to be
confusion and delay on the speakers’ platform as the program progressed. There certainly was no document that said
“great speech” will be delivered at the end of the day or at such and such a
time, in part because the King speech was not in final form on the eve of the
March. As one of the organizers has
since reported, the logistics – not the speech – were the priority of March
planners.[7]
I recall hearing quite recently an interview on public radio
– sorry, I don’t have the citation – in which it was reported that because the
program was running late, King was asked to cut his remarks – whatever they
were going to be - short (which he fortunately didn’t do). On the radio broadcast, Shepherd does refer
to the King speech as brilliant, but that’s about all he said about it. He hardly mentions it. That is, from the viewpoint of someone there,
as opposed to someone seeing a TV news or newsreel clip afterwards, the King
speech was just part of a larger event.
To hear that alternative perspective, I suggest you now go the Shepherd
broadcast.[8] I have edited out the
opening of the broadcast which was unrelated to the March.
The March section runs 39 minutes.
Ultimately, what matters in Washington is political pressure
and that was what was accomplished and what was intended. The fact that a vast gathering could be brought
together, and peacefully, in the capital city did push what - after the
assassination of the President - became the Johnson administration and the
Congress to enact the subsequent civil rights legislation. The idea of the March on Washington was the
March, not the speeches. Shepherd
experienced the March as an indication that the “battle is damn near over,”
clearly an historical overstatement in hindsight but an expression of his
impression.
In any case, on August 28, 1963, when I left before the King
speech – and even after hearing it on the radio – I didn’t think I had missed
out on something. The alternative view
came about only after the news media decided that the speech was really what
had happened rather than that the March on Washington contained the
speech. In the new view, the March on
Washington was just to provide an audience for the speech. Once that interpretation became the standard
verdict of history, it created the family joke that daddy went to the March on
Washington but left before the King speech.
====
Endnotes:
[8] A
glossary below provides information on some names and terms used in the
broadcast.
====
Glossary: Since
listeners to the 1963 broadcast may not be familiar with names and phrases
cited, here is a listing:
V-E Day. Victory in Europe Day, May 8, 1945. Surrender of Nazi Germany ending World War II
fighting in Europe but not in the Pacific Theater.
V-J Day. Surrender of Japan, ending World War II. On August 14, 1945, it was announced that
Japan had surrendered unconditionally to the Allies, effectively ending World
War II. Since then, both August 14 and August 15 have been known as
"Victory over Japan Day," or simply "V-J Day." The term has
also been used for September 2, 1945, when Japan's formal surrender took place
aboard the U.S.S. Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay. Coming several months after
the surrender of Nazi Germany, Japan's capitulation in the Pacific brought six
years of hostilities to a final and highly anticipated close. Source: http://www.history.com/topics/v-j-day.
Marion Anderson.
Famed black singer.
Having her sing at the Lincoln Memorial in
1963 was symbolic because of a 1939 incident: In 1939 her manager tried to set
up a performance for her at Washington, D.C.'s Constitution Hall. But the
owners of the hall, the Daughters of the American Revolution (D.A.R.), informed
Anderson and her manager that no dates were available. That was far from the
truth. The real reason for turning Anderson away lay in a policy put in place
by the D.A.R. that committed the hall to being a place strictly for white
performers. When word leaked out to the public about what had happened, an
uproar ensued, led in part by Eleanor Roosevelt, who invited Anderson to
perform instead at the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday. In front of a crowd
of more than 75,000, Anderson offered up a riveting performance that was
broadcast live for millions of radio listeners.
Source:
http://www.biography.com/people/marian-anderson-9184422.
Lester Smith:
Another WOR reporter.
