What the 1963 March on Washington was really about

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Jeff Roquen, History News Network -  Half a century later, the historical memory of the watershed event has been encapsulated in two sound bites from Martin Luther King’s speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial: “I have a dream” and “Free at last, Free at last, Thank God almighty, we are free at last!” Not only do these eighteen words fail to capture the significance of his address but they also belie the ultimate motivation behind the movement. As a dual call for desegregation and economic empowerment, referencing the event as simply the “March on Washington” has proven to be an injustice to history and to the intended legacy of the civil rights era.

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was a call for three types of justice -- economic, social and political. Although social equality was first on the agenda, it was not divorced from the other dimensions of liberty.

African-American labor leader A. Philip Randolph, who had forced Franklin Roosevelt to issue an executive order prohibiting job discrimination in defense hiring by threatening to conduct a peaceful march on the Capitol in 1941, was a progressive who sought to equalize employment access and lower income inequality. Two decades later, Randolph and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin crafted an ambitious agenda to promote “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” for all Americans. In the first draft of the organizing manual for the March, Rustin advocated large-scale federal programs to alleviate the chronic poverty and underemployment uncovered in the influential 1962 monograph The Other America by Michael Harrington. The second and final version of the manual stated their cause in the most direct terms:

We march to redress old grievances and to help resolve an American crisis. That crisis is born of the twin evils of racism and economic deprivation. They rob all people, Negro and white, of dignity, self-respect and freedom.

At the same time. King was demonstrating similar thinking to Randolph and Rustin in his book Why We Can’t Wait. After participating in grueling civil rights campaigns in Albany, Georgia, Birmingham, Alabama and throughout the South, King witnessed indigence in the region first-hand and called for a Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged “to attack the tenacious poverty which so paradoxically exists in the midst of plenty.” In a word, Randolph, Rustin and King all grasped the ultimate reality of racism. It was not simply social. It was structural....

Over the last fifty years, Americans have forgotten half of the equation of freedom. As a result, our nation continues to endure the same economic deprivations. ..

One year before his assassination in 1968, King visited the small town of Waycross, Georgia and asked his audience, “And you know why we aren’t free?” He then answered his own question. “Because we are poor. Poverty is not having enough money to make ends meet. Poverty is being unemployed. Poverty is being underemployed. Poverty is working on a full-time job, getting only a part-time income.”