[August 28th marks the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, one of the single most important events in 20th century American history. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for and from that event—not including Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic speech, about which I’ve written a good bit already!]
On two
important contexts illustrated by a planned 1941 march.
The
concept of a march on Washington to push the government toward certain actions
is a longstanding one in American history, going back at least to examples like
“Coxey’s
Army” in 1894 and the Bonus Army in 1932. The
latter in particular seems to have been one inspiration for labor leader
A. Philip Randolph and civil rights activist Bayard
Rustin’s developing early 1941 plans for a march on Washington to protest
the Franklin Roosevelt administration’s segregation and discrimination in
wartime hiring practices. Randolph
and NAACP leader Walter White had met with Roosevelt in September 1940 to
argue for integrating all levels of the armed forces and war efforts but had
gotten nowhere, with the White House
issuing a statement that “The policy of the War Department is not to
intermingle colored and white enlisted personnel.” So in January Randolph
proposed the concept (with the formal name of the March
on Washington Movement) of a collective march on Washington to put pressure
on the administration, and he began working with Rustin to plan the logistics
for an early July march which they hoped would bring at least 100,000
protesters to DC.
Just a
week before the march’s scheduled date President Roosevelt signed Executive
Order 8802, establishing a federal Fair
Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) that both desegregated wartime
industries specifically and prohibited discrimination in federal vocational and
training programs more broadly. Perhaps Roosevelt was genuinely convinced that
this was the right step, or perhaps he was fearful of the bad press that a
sizeable protest would generate just as the US was ramping up its war efforts;
Randolph seems to have feared the latter, as he maintained
the March on Washington Movement throughout the war to keep the pressure
on. And in any case, these March on Washington contexts remind us of the
consistent racial segregation that plagued the Roosevelt Administration’s
signature (and in many ways progressive) programs like
the New Deal. Whoever was in the White House, civil rights leaders knew
that they had to push and pressure to achieve any and all steps toward equality
and justice, and Randolph and Rustin revealed that a march on Washington could
be one important tool in that arsenal.
The
central roles and relationship between those two men in these 1941 events
likewise illustrates another important context for the 1963 march and Civil
Rights Movement histories overall: the interconnections between labor and civil
rights. As I highlighted in
this post, far too often the American labor movement has featured white
supremacist forces in defining roles; that trend unquestionably played a role
in Randolph’s and others’ formation
of a 1920s labor union specifically for Black workers. As I hope this whole
weeklong series will indicate, there are many layers to the 1963 March that we
need to better remember, but very high on the list has to be its full name: the
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. I’ve often seen Martin Luther King
Jr.’s turn in the late 1960s
toward economic and labor
issues described as a shift in priorities, but in truth the entire Civil
Rights Movement was founded on a recognition that those issues were
interconnected with—not the sole emphasis by any means, but an integral
component of—ideals like freedom, equality, and justice. Just one more reason to
remember the aborted but essential 1941 March on Washington.
Next March
context tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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