1 ago 1963 ano - Morch on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

Descrição:

march on washington: Officially named the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, on August 28, 1963, a quarter of a million people marched to the Lincoln Memorial to demand that Congress end Jim Crow racial discrimination and launch a major jobs program to bring needed employment to black communities.


Civil rights leaders took advantage of a long-planned event for a massive demonstration in Washington set for that August to marshal support for Kennedy’s bill. The idea of the demonstration in Washington had first been proposed by A. Philip Randolph in 1941. Working with Bayard Rustin, Randolph revived the idea and in early 1963 called for a march to mark the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. Thousands of volunteers across the country coordinated car pools, “freedom buses,” and “freedom trains” that delivered a quarter of a million people to the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963. Officially named the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the event became known as the March on Washington.

Although Randolph and Rustin had planned the event, Martin Luther King Jr. was its public face. It was King’s dramatic “I Have a Dream” speech, beginning with his admonition that too many black people lived “on a lonely island of poverty” and ending with the exclamation from a traditional black spiritual — “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, we are free at last!” — that captured the nation’s imagination. The sight of 250,000 blacks and whites marching solemnly together marked the high point of the civil rights movement and confirmed King’s position as its leading spokesperson.

To have any chance of getting the civil rights bill through Congress, King, Randolph, and Rustin believed they had to sustain a broad coalition of blacks and whites. They could not afford to lose the support of moderate whites. Young SNCC member John Lewis had planned a provocative speech for that afternoon. Lewis wrote in his original draft that a “time will come when we will not confine our marching to Washington. We will march through the South, through the Heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did.” Conveying a growing restlessness among black youth, Lewis warned: “We shall fragment the South into a thousand pieces and put them back together again in the image of democracy.” Rustin and others implored Lewis to tone down his rhetoric. Only minutes before he stepped up to the podium, Lewis relented. He delivered a more conciliatory speech, but his conflict with march organizers signaled an emerging rift in the movement (see “Thinking Like a Historian”).

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