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March on Washington List of Demands: 2013 Goals Mirror Those Set in 1963
In front of 170 W 130 St., March on Washington, l to r, Bayard Rustin, Deputy Director, and Cleveland Robinson, Chairman of Administrative Committee / World Telegram & Sun photo by O. Fernandez. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
By Janell Ross
Listen to talk radio, peruse the front page of the nation’s major news sites and covers of the big magazines this week, and the 1963 March on Washington occupies a lot of real estate.
There are the stories and images of a peaceful gathering of Americans committed to nothing beyond calling for social justice and legal equality. There are the tales of how a spontaneous suggestion from Mahalia Jackson or some unseen divine source inspired Martin Luther King Jr.’s evocative, largely ad-libbed speech. And then there are the apocryphal yarns that recast the march as an event so righteous that people across the political spectrum — both then and now — supported its architects and their goals.
But among the most critical details often left out of the nation’s tidy and affirming remembrances of the 1963 March on Washington is the 10-point list (pdf) of social, political and economic demands the event’s organizers dubbed “What We Demand.” The contents of that list and any fact-based assessment of where the nation stands when measured against it today point to a more complicated story.
Nearly 50 years to the day that hundreds of thousands of people marched to the National Mall in support of those goals, a new list of largely economic and political demands by a collection of major civil rights organizations confirms just how much distance remains in the nation’s long journey toward universal justice and equality.
“The reason we are releasing a new list of demands on the eve of the [2013] march is because we want people to realize that when this march is over, this struggle is not over,” said Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League.
In 1963, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom — the event’s full name — wasn’t just about freedom or putting an end to Jim Crow, said Steven F. Lawson, a historian and professor emeritus at Rutgers University, who has written about civil rights and black politics since 1945.
“People tend to forget,” said Lawson, “but it was also about jobs, about demanding an end to a long national history of exclusion, injustice and deprivation that were then an almost mandatory part of being anything other than white and male.”
At the time, the list of demands connected to the march and its organizers was considered so radical, public-safety officials feared the large crowd, Lawson said. In Washington, D.C., officials suspended all alcohol sales for the first time since Prohibition.
The march represented a moment long feared.
Almost a decade had passed since the Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of the nation’s public schools in the groundbreaking Brown v. Board of Education case. But, most students attended racially homogeneous schools where black students continued to learn in sub-par facilities and only had access to white students’ outdated and often bedraggled books. An estimated 10 percent of black Americans were unemployed, a figure twice as high as the number of white Americans unable to find work. Even worse, 48 percent of black Americans lived in poverty, and overwhelming majorities were concentrated at the bottom end of the income ladder, living in low-quality housing or poor neighborhoods.
So as labor and civil rights activists shaped the 1963 march’s demands, they called on the Kennedy administration and Congress to back a civil rights package that would protect minority-voting rights and individual blacks from an ongoing campaign of domestic terror prosecuted with threats, economic intimidation and sometimes deadly violence.
Read More March on Washington List of Demands: 2013 Goals Mirror Those Set in 1963.
I Have a Copyright: The Problem With MLK’s Speech
Dr. Martin Luther King giving his “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington in Washington, D.C., on 28 August 1963. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
By Lauren Williams
I have a dream that on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls as they watch the footage on TV of Martin Luther King Jr. delivering his famous words. I have a dream that on the red hills of Georgia, the great-grandsons of former slaves and the great-grandsons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood this week, open their MacBooks and pull up the seminal speech on the internet.
But that speech is not free, alas.
It will not be in the public domain until 2038, 70 years after King’s death. Until then, any commercial enterprises wishing to legally broadcast King’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered August 28, 1963, on the National Mall, or reprint its words must pay a hefty fee. CBS and USA Today learned this the hard way in the 1990s, when both reached undisclosed settlements with King’s estate after using the speech without permission. Intellectual Properties Management, the King family business that works in conjunction with music company EMI Publishing to license King’s copyrighted image and works, did not respond to an inquiry from Mother Jones about the cost of hosting a video of the speech on our site.
via I Have a Copyright: The Problem With MLK’s Speech | Mother Jones.
50 years after King speech, discrimination feeds black economic gap: Obama
President Barack Obama said on Friday that America’s history of racial discrimination had contributed to a persistent economic gap between blacks and whites in the 50 years since Martin Luther King’s landmark “I have a dream” speech.
Obama said his own story showed the “enormous strides” the United States had made since King’s speech, but as Washington commemorates the anniversary of King’s address, the disparity between black and white income remained.
“What we’ve also seen is that the legacy of discrimination, slavery, Jim Crow, has meant that some of the institutional barriers for success for a lot of groups still exist,” Obama, the first black U.S. president, said in answering a question at a town hall meeting at Binghamton University in New York state.
“You know, African-American poverty in this country is still significantly higher than other groups. Same is true for Latinos. Same is true for Native Americans,” he said.
By Jeff Mason & Ian Simpson
Divisive U.S. politics is a factor in the growing gap between rich and poor in America, Obama said.
“The tendency to suggest somehow that government is taking something from you and giving it to somebody else and your problems will be solved if we just ignore them or don’t help them … is something that we have to constantly struggle against, whether we’re black or white or whatever color we are,” he said.
Data shows that five decades after King’s speech during the “March for Jobs and Freedom” in Washington on August 28, 1963, the black-white economic gap has persisted despite huge gains in education and political clout by blacks.
Read More 50 years after King speech, discrimination feeds black economic gap: Obama | Reuters.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Martin Luther King leaning on a lectern. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
By Marian Wright Edelman
In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was the promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the ‘unalienable Rights of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’ It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.
–Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., address at the March on Washington, August 28, 1963
As the nation celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, many are discussing what Dr. King would say to the nation and world today and tell us to do. But his message to us today is as clear as it was fifty years ago if only we could hear, heed, and follow his warnings about what we need to do to make America America.
Just as Biblical Old and New Testament prophets were rejected, scorned, and dishonored in their own land in their times, so was Dr. King by many when he walked and worked among us. Now that he is dead, many Americans remember him warmly but have sanitized and trivialized his message and life. They remember Dr. King the great orator but not Dr. King the disturber of unjust peace. They applaud the Dr. King who opposed violence but not the Dr. King who called for massive nonviolent demonstrations to end war and poverty in our national and world house. They recite the “I Have a Dream” part of his August 1963 speech but ignore its main metaphor of the promissory note still bouncing at America’s bank of justice, waiting to be cashed by millions of poor and minority citizens. And while we love to celebrate his dream and great oratorical skills, we ignore his fears and repeated warnings about America’s misguided priorities and values. He worried that we were missing God’s opportunity to become a great and just nation by sharing our enormous riches with the poor and overcoming what he called the “giant triplets” of racism, materialism, and militarism.
In his last Sunday sermon at Washington National Cathedral, Dr. King retold the parable of the rich man Dives who ignored the poor and sick man Lazarus who came every day seeking crumbs from Dives’ table. Dives did nothing. Dives went to hell, Dr. King said, not because he was rich but because he did not realize his wealth was his opportunity to bridge the gulf separating him from his brother and allowed Lazarus to become invisible. He warned this could happen to rich America, “if we don’t use her vast resources to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life.”
At Dr. King’s death in 1968 when he was calling for a Poor People’s Campaign there were 25.4 million poor Americans, including 11 million poor children, and our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was $4.13 trillion. Today there are 46.2 million poor people, including 16.1 million poor children, almost half living in extreme poverty, and our GDP is three times larger, and shamefully the younger children are the poorer they are. One in three Black and Latino children are poor. National wealth and income inequality are at near record levels while hunger, homelessness, illiteracy, fear, and hopelessness stalk millions of children and adults across our land who have been left behind in our economy. Isn’t it time to ask ourselves again with urgency whether America is missing once again the great opportunity and mandate God has given us to be a beacon of hope and justice for the least among us, beginning with our children, who are the poorest Americans?
Read More Where Do We Go From Here? | Marian Wright Edelman.
Thousands mark March on Washington
Demonstrator at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom 1963 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
By Alan Gomez & Eliza Collins
Tens of thousands gathered Saturday on the nation’s “front yard,” the National Mall near the Lincoln Memorial, yearning for a bit of that transcendent sense of racial unity heralded on this spot by the Rev. Martin Luther King 50 years ago in his “I Have a Dream” speech.
From the memorial steps where King spoke, remarks by a host of early speakers ranging from former NAACP Chairman Julian Bond to the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. touched on an myriad themes of voting rights, widening economic disparity, how the issue of race in America, despite so many advances, remains unfinished business to this day.
Jackson punctuated his remarks with the refrain “keep dreaming.”
Read More Thousands mark March on Washington.
50 years after the March on Washington, what would MLK march for today?
MLK Memorial (Photo credit: Lane 4 Imaging)
By
What would the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. march for if he were alive today?
America has made progress on many fronts in the half-century since King electrified a crowd of 200,000 people, and millions of Americans watching on television, with his “I Have a Dream” address at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. But there is still much to do to achieve his vision of equality.
Fortunately, many Americans are involved in grass-roots movements that follow in his footsteps. King began his activism as a crusader against racial segregation, but he soon recognized that his battle was part of a much broader fight for a more humane society. Today, at age 84, King would no doubt still be on the front lines, lending his voice and his energy to major battles for justice.
Voting rights: Along with other civil rights leaders, King fought hard to dismantle Jim Crow laws that kept blacks from voting. He was proud of his role in pushing Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act in 1965. He’d be outraged by the Supreme Court’s recent ruling to weaken the law that, among other things, increased the number of black voters and black elected officials.
Since that ruling, a movement has burgeoned to stop states’ efforts to require photo IDs in order to vote, shrink the early-voting period, and end same-day voter registration and pre-registration for teenagerswho will turn 18 by Election Day. Today, King might lend his name to these campaigns and join the Moral Monday protests in North Carolina, where thousands have opposed that state’s efforts to restrict voting rights.
via 50 years after the March on Washington, what would MLK march for today? – The Washington Post.
Bayard Rustin: the gay black pacifist at the heart of the March on Washington
Bayard Ruskin at news briefing on the Civil Rights March on Washington in the Statler Hotel(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
By Gary Younge
When civil rights leaders met at the Roosevelt Hotel in Harlem in early July 1963 to hammer out the ground rules by which they would work together to organise the March on Washington there was really only one main sticking point: Bayard Rustin.
Rustin, a formidable organiser and central figure in the civil rights movement, was a complex and compelling figure. Raised a Quaker, his political development would take him through pacifism, communism, socialism and into the civil rights movement in dramatic fashion. In 1944, after refusing to fight in World War Two, he had been jailed as a conscientious objector. It was primarily through him that the leadership would adopt non-violent direct action not only as a strategy but a principle. “The only weapons we have is our bodies,” he once said. “And we have to tuck them in places so wheels don’t turn.”
Rustin was also openly gay, an attribute which was regarded as a liability in the early sixties in a movement dominated by clerics. His position became particularly vulnerable following his arrest in Pasadena, in 1953, when he was caught having sex with two men in a parked car. Charged with lewd vagrancy he plead out to a lesser ‘morals charge’ and was sent to jail for 60 days.
Some in the room that day believed all this made him too great a liability to be associated with such a high profile event. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, was candid. “I don’t want you leading that march on Washington, because you know I don’t give a damn about what they say, but publicly I don’t want to have to defend the draft dodging,” he said. “I know you’re a Quaker, but that’s not what I’ll have to defend. I’ll have to defend draft dodging. I’ll have to defend promiscuity. The question is never going to be homosexuality, it’s going to be promiscuity and I can’t defend that. And the fact is that you were a member of the Young Communist League. And I don’t care what you say, I can’t defend that.”
Wilkins did not get his way. Rustin would lead the march and do so brilliantly while Wilkins would be called upon to defend him and do so. Fifty years on the White House has announced that Bayard Rustin will be posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. The award marks the end of a journey for Rustin, who died in 1987: from marginalisation in both life and history to mainstream official accolade just in time for the 50th anniversary of arguably his crowning achievement – organising the march on Washington.
Don’t Mess With Black Twitter
Image via CrunchBase
By Daniella Gibbs Leger
If you weren’t paying attention last week, you missed quite the show on Black Twitter. Oh, in case you didn’t know, Black Twitter is a real thing. It is often hilarious (as with the Paula Deen recipes hashtag); sometimes that humor comes with a bit of a sting (see any hashtag related to Don Lemon). Last week it was all of that and the stories that inspired the outpouring could not have been any different.
Last week self-proclaimed male feminist Hugo Schwyzer told a story apologizing for previous bad behavior, and in doing so set of a firestorm that I’m sure he wasn’t expecting. You can read the entire backstory here, but the short version is: He apologized for being especially awful to women of color, and a white female twitterer basically said, “Why do you need to apologize for that/to them?” And that, ladies and gents, is when the firestorm began. There has long been some suspicion between women of color and the “feminist” movement. Many black women did not feel that they had a real place among feminists, and while that is slowly changing and more women are charting a path forward, every now and then something comes up to remind us of why some folks were getting the side-eye in the first place.
What came after that was a funny, sometimes heartbreaking conversation on the #solidarityisforwhitewomen hashtag. I was seeing stories from people that touched a deep nerve with many, some tweets that I could have written, and some that just made me laugh out loud. A few people tried to interject and say that women shouldn’t be fighting like that “in public.” My response to that is, whatever. Easy for you to say when the offense isn’t lobbed in your direction. Change within movements doesn’t happen when parties just sit quietly on the sidelines and take it. People aren’t going to change their behavior or at least be more aware of it unless they are called on it. At the end of the day, some people may have gotten their feelings hurt by that hashtag, but I’m guessing that more people walked away learning something.
The end of last week saw a different issue blow-up on Black Twitter — the Harriet Tubman sex parody. Sounds hilarious, right? (sarcasm, fyi). I’m not going to link to that mess and give it anymore eyeballs. You can Google it if you want. Suffice to say, Russell Simmons’ Def Comedy Jam website posted what he initially thought was a very funny video depicting Harriet Tubman having sex with her master to curry favor so she could run the underground railroad. I don’t have to go into the history here, and how most of those relationships were not consensual — you all get that. I really would like to know what they were thinking with this? They are not Dave Chappelle — if you are going to push the line of comedy that hard, you had better be surgical with your precision. And, I would argue, rarely, if ever, would most find that type of thing funny. But clearly, humor is in the eye of the beholder.
Read More Don’t Mess With Black Twitter | Daniella Gibbs Leger.
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