Opinion: This single day defined the decade that transformed America

Opinion by Peniel E. Joseph

(CNN) — No major civil rights legislation passed in 1963, but it was the most important year in the decade that transformed America.

Monday, August 28, is the 60th anniversary of the historic March On Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Best remembered today for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the march offered average Americans, along with public figures like then-President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the closest thing to attending a mass movement meeting they ever would see.

While the president and attorney general watched from the White House, they both marveled at the importance and eloquence of King’s speech. “He’s damn good,” Kennedy remarked afterword. A smiling Kennedy greeted King afterward with the line that resonates most, “I have a dream.”

From one perspective, the March On Washington was the capstone of a tumultuous, triumphant and tragic year filled with civil rights demonstrations, protests that cast a bright light on the violence of a system of racial segregation, the brutality of police such as Birmingham public safety commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor and the cruelty of Southern politicians, most notably Alabama Gov. George Wallace.

1963 was a year filled with dramatic confrontations and extraordinary twists and turns. The centennial anniversary of the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation brought renewed pressure on the Kennedy administration and its New Frontier vision to finally make bold moves in support of civil rights. The Harlem-born writer James Baldwin became the most impactful global literary and political intellectual of the year with his book “The Fire Next Time,” a slim volume of two powerful essays (published in magazines the previous year) that distilled the relationship among race, American exceptionalism and the nation’s original sin of racial slavery and its afterlife in Jim Crow segregation. Baldwin’s prose shone with eloquence, anger, vulnerability, truth and hope. He loved America enough to criticize it when he experienced disappointment, as he so often did.

The forces that fueled segregation and racial hierarchy in America — and the forces that galvanized the political resistance to both — sped up that year.

Events in Birmingham, for example, forced the world to take notice.

A local desegregation campaign, led by Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, collaborated with King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in April for a long-planned assault on the “Magic City.” Martin Luther King Jr.’s arrest and imprisonment on Good Friday, April 12, set the stage for his “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” which was a critique not just of White liberals but also of the Kennedy administration’s efforts, halting at best, to end racial injustice. Despite the rhetorical power of the letter, which linked the civil rights movement to longstanding American traditions of freedom dating back to country’s founding, it would take the sight of high-pressure water canons, powerful enough to strip the bark off of trees in Kelly Ingram Park, and attacking German shepherds being unleased on protesters, to capture the world’s attention.

Collective horror at Birmingham’s violence helped those working for progress on civil rights — Martin Luther King Jr., President Kennedy, Black school children, White and Jewish activists, organized labor and ordinary citizens — to mold consensus among the general public at a time when it appeared, to much of the world, that parts of America’s democratic fabric were falling apart or at least fraying at the seams.

Kennedy delivered the speech of his life on June 11, 1963, giving the best address on racial justice in American history up until that time. Kennedy called civil rights “a moral issue” that the entire nation would have to support. The crisis of race and democracy, observed the president, could afford no bystanders. “Those who do nothing, invite shame and violence,” said Kennedy. “Those who act boldly recognize right as well as reality.”

Early the next morning, Medgar Evers — the upright, powerful and stalwart NAACP Field Secretary in Mississippi — was assassinated by a White supremacist (who would not be convicted for his crime until 1994).

The March for Jobs and Freedom, announced July 2, forged a new consensus across partisan divides by linking American traditions of freedom and democracy with the Black movement’s aspirational notions of dignity and citizenship.

Bayard Rustin — a Black, gay and radical social democrat who spent time in prison as a conscientious objector during World War II — led the organizing of the March On Washington at the behest of A. Philip Randolph, the legendary founder and labor leader who served as head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Rustin endured vicious homophobia within and outside of the movement. A longtime advocate of non-violent disobedience, Rustin served as a mentor to Martin Luther King Jr., who eventually distanced himself from Rustin out of fear of being compromised by colleagues (such as Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, who had threatened a few years earlier to weaponize Bayard’s homosexuality against King).

Yet Rustin endured, making a final unstoppable comeback within movement circles through his ingenuous organizing skills that helped ensure the eclectic coalition of religious, labor, student, civil rights, business and civic groups were all there in Washington, equipped with buses, portable toilets, sandwiches, water fountains, chairs for dignitaries and more.

It wasn’t a perfect event by any stretch. Baldwin refused to have his speech censored out of fear he would go off script, so actor Burt Lancaster read it instead. John Lewis, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, cut out parts of his speech that offended Patrick O’Boyle, the Archbishop of Washington. The request came from the venerable labor leader and march organizer Randolph as part of a plea to maintain unity. No Black women delivered major speeches at the march, despite the invaluable leadership of Rosa Parks, Gloria Richardson, Daisy Bates and National Council for Negro Women President Dorothy Height.

When it was King’s time to speak, his “I Have a Dream” peroration overshadowed the speech’s bone and sinew. He discussed reparations and the need for organizers to withstand prison and police violence. He publicly repudiated Southern governors. Those elements were then, as now, largely drowned out by the ocean of emotion that his preacher’s cadence brought forth at the keynote’s conclusion.

“Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy,” said King at the beginning of his speech. Sixty years later, that promise is not yet fully realized, but the massive nonviolent demonstration on August 28, 1963 remains one of the most resonant examples of King’s Beloved Community the nation has ever witnessed.

Democracy is a journey and never a destination, perhaps the most important lesson left for us by the March On Washington. No civil rights legislation was passed in 1963, but it set the table for all the watershed legislation that subsequently passed.

Progress in 1963, just like in our own time, was not linear. Six decades later, America has made hopeful breakthroughs and experienced tragic setbacks. If we do more than commemorate the March, if we strive to embody the simultaneously radical and pragmatic spirits that enabled by King, Rustin and so many others, we can find hope in the actions this generation takes toward fulfilling a dream that remains alive in our own time.

The-CNN-Wire
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