March on Washington 50th Anniversary

This year marks the 50th an­niversary of the March on Wash­ing­ton for Jobs and Free­dom, which brought hun­dreds of thou­sands to the na­tion’s cap­it­ol to bring at­ten­tion to the poor state of civil rights in the coun­try, and call for the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment to take ac­tion. Dr. Mar­tin Luth­er King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream,” speech has since be­come the most well-re­membered mo­ment of the march.

Colum­nist Max Freed­man fol­lowed the march with a ringing en­dorse­ment of Mar­tin Luth­er King Jr.’s oratory prowess on Sept. 9, 1963, prais­ing him as a “su­preme orator, a type so rare as al­most to be for­got­ten in our age.”
A pre­view pub­lished the day of the march notes a “jit­tery” mood in the na­tion’s cap­it­ol, with thou­sands of po­lice of­ficers, Na­tion­al Guards­men and sol­diers brought out for the event.
Colum­nist Mor­rie Rys­kind ex­pressed his cri­ti­cisms of the march in the Aug. 28, 1963, is­sue of The Times, ar­guing that the civil rights move­ment had “turned in­to mo­bism and thus for­feited the sym­pathy of the av­er­age Amer­ic­an.”
A story from the Times pub­lished Aug. 25, 1963, de­scribes the March as a “dra­mat­ic, su­per-Birm­ing­ham demon­stra­tion,” and a “spec­tac­u­lar sum­mer cli­max to the Negro re­volt of 1963.”
The of­fi­cial pro­gram handed out dur­ing the March on Wash­ing­ton for Jobs and Free­dom on Aug. 28, 1963.
The lead­er­ship of 10 groups sup­port­ing the march, even down to the last minute, wanted to en­sure that the demon­stra­tion would re­main as civil as pos­sible. “It will be or­derly, but not sub­ser­vi­ent,” they de­clared just two days be­fore the event.
The As­so­ci­ated Press’ story, run by the Los Angeles Times the day after the march, in­ter­est­ingly doesn’t reach what is now re­membered as the de­fin­ing mo­ment of the day, Mar­tin Luth­er King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, un­til the 10th para­graph. Tak­ing pre­ced­ence were Pres­id­ent John F. Kennedy’s re­sponse, a re­port on the weath­er and a tally of those treated at first aid tents.
Mar­tin Luth­er King Jr. was not al­ways a near uni­ver­sally be­loved fig­ure. As in­dic­ated by this column from Max Freed­man, pub­lished Aug. 20, 1965, some thought his stance on the Vi­et­nam War would over­shad­ow the goals of the civil rights mo­ment.
Though the march is now held in high re­gard, Amer­ic­ans wer­en’t so sure it would be suc­cess­ful. Just 22% held a fa­vor­able view of the march be­fore it began, com­pared with 63% who thought un­fa­vor­ably. Of those, 8% pre­dicted vi­ol­ence, and 17% ex­pec­ted it to ac­com­plish noth­ing.
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