The final five minutes of Martin Luther King’s soaring oration on Aug. 28, 1963, still ring in our ears today. They remain the most cited and inspirational words spoken among the many speeches delivered by civil rights leaders that echoed across the National Mall during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Monday marks its 60th anniversary.
“I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day, even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice,” King said.
But his words were not the most radical of the day, even though “I Have A Dream” has overshadowed in popular memory most everything else that transpired that summer afternoon. In this episode of History As It Happens, historians William P. Jones and Thomas Jackson discuss the extensive economic agenda articulated by the marchers with the aim of influencing President Kennedy’s proposed civil rights legislation.
More than a demonstration for racial harmony and desegregation alone, the march – organized by longtime activist A. Philip Randolph – demanded full employment, higher minimum wages, federal protection for civil rights advocates targeted by local police departments, and much more. About 250,000 people of all races peacefully gathered on the Mall when the Black unemployment rate was soaring, depriving many Black people of the economic bounty of the post-war period.
In the words of John Lewis, then the head of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, “We march today for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of. For hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here. For they are receiving starvation wages, or no wages at all… It is true that we support the administration’s civil rights bill. We support it with great reservations, however.”
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