These days, the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom is most remembered for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech. But it's important not to boil a movement down to one man. Movements are about more than their leaders, in fact, but in this case we can at least understand something more about how the march came to be, how King had the opportunity to say those famous words in front of such an awe-inspiring crowd, by remembering some of the march's other leaders. Take A. Philip Randolph, the lead organizer of the march.
As the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Randolph had planned a march on Washington in 1941 protesting discrimination in the military and defense industries:
As plans for the march grew, President Franklin D. Roosevelt invited Randolph to the White House. The president asked Randolph to call off the march. Randolph asked the president to issue an executive order making it mandatory that blacks be allowed to work in defense industry plants. The president said he couldn’t do that. Then, Randolph said, he couldn’t call off the march. [...]
On June 25, 1941, six days before the march was scheduled to take place, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, banning discrimination in the government and defense industry.
Randolph and the leaders of the 1963 march met with another president, John F. Kennedy, as they planned the march. In that meeting, and in pulling the key civil rights leaders together to make the march happen, Randolph was the leader, as John Lewis forcefully expresses (below the fold).
“I’ve always said — and it’s not to take away from the role of Dr. King or anyone else — but without A. Philip Randolph, there wouldn’t have been a March on Washington,” Lewis said. “People should never, ever forget the role that A. Philip Randolph played. He should be looked at as one of the founding fathers of a new America, a better America.” [...]
“He was the only one who could hold the six of us together,” Lewis said. “Long before people used the phrase ‘check your ego at the door,’ he didn’t need to say that. There was so much respect and so much love just to be in his presence. ... I’ve said it many times, if he had been born another color, or maybe in another part of the world, he would have been president or prime minister. He was a natural leader. Gifted, smart, one of a kind.”
Randolph became a leader through being an organizer, a union organizer specifically, at a time when organizing by black workers wasn't particularly popular even with many other unions. But by 1963, Randolph was a vice president of the AFL-CIO and president of the Negro American Labor Council, and unions were a significant source of funding for the march.
So many others should be remembered for their roles in organizing the march and making it a success—Bayard Rustin, for instance, is high on that list. Organizing a movement capable of bringing that many people to one place, capable of winning the victories that had already happened and then continuing to drive major legislation and cultural change, could only be the work of many. And many of those had been organized by A. Philip Randolph.
