What was it like 48 years ago?

Credit for this post, if credit is due, goes to Zaheer Ali, a New York City historian who asked in response to a tweet saying that I was at the March on Washington if I had ever written anything about it.  No, I haven’t, until just now, when I should be working on a book proposal.

I remember as much about the circumstances as I do about the event.  My aunt tried to convince my mother she shouldn’t let me go.  I was 18, age of the immortals.  Just graduated from high school, working in a factory for the summer before starting at Haverford.  I was determined to march despite rumors of violence.  I certainly did not want to take advice from my rascist aunt, who went livid.  Fortunately a more liberal uncle weighed in on my side.  Defiance proved unnecessary–my mother was a liberal and thought it natural that I wanted to go.

It’s all about witness, wanting to testify to your beliefs by moving your body to the right place at the right time.  I’d been to Washington before, as a child and tourist.  It was still a segregated city then, though as best I understand it more by tradition than by law.  My parents would only eat in chain restaurants that had integrated. Returning by bus that August day of 1963 was a right of passage for me:  a first opportunity to witness on my own.

What has become known as Martin Luther King’s greatest moment I thought of at the time as Bayard Rustin’s.  No, I did not know he was gay, or even what gay was, but I knew he was the great organizer.  He proved it that day, assembling an enormous mass of people, whites as well as people who then mostly still called themselves Negro.  There was a long list of speakers.  Martin Luther King was the climax, but I can assure you that many of the others stirred the crowd as well.  I particularly remember being moved by A. Philip Randolph, but don’t ask me any longer what he said.  And the music!  Dylan, Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary:  mostly white, but “radical” as it was known then.

I had to leave New Rochelle, where my family lived, early in the morning, around 4 am.  I grabbed the brown bag from the fridge with what I thought was my lunch in it, only to discover as we arrived in DC that the smell of raw fish was coming from my brown bag in the overhead rack.  I had to borrow a couple of dollars from a cousin to get a hot dog or two for lunch.

We marched from somewhere not too far–maybe Thomas Circle.  Memory confuses this occasion with the several later occasions I joined antiwar marches in DC.  The spirit was good, really good.  Everyone singing, chatting, laughing.  I don’t remember a moment of tension all day.  I guess the segregationists decided the crowd was too big and stayed home.  Certainly it was nothing like the venomous atmosphere I endured two years later demonstrating in Cambridge, Maryland, where the national guard fixed bayonets and gas masks to confront us in the main street.

The message of the day was integration.  Those who cite MLK’s “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers” have got it right.  It is hard to appreciate today how much imagination was needed then to picture integration of blacks and whites in the United States.  None of us were sure though at the time that MLK had quite risen to the occasion.  Was his speech really eloquent enough?  Did it rise to the occasion?  Would anything make a real difference in a country that seemed hopelessly attached to segregation and racism?

We all think we know the answers to those question now, but at the time nothing was clear, except the day and the overwhelming power of that crowd of witnesses.  These were people who really could sing “we shall overcome.”  And they were determined to do it, though they had no idea how long it would take.

What does this have to do with peace and war?  Everything:  Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Syria have all trod the path of nonviolent witness, some more successfully than others.  Even Libya did it briefly.   Hesitatingly, sometimes inadequately but increasingly the United States has come out on the right side, witnessing for the world to see that it supports human dignity.  There really is no other choice.  Bashar al Assad and King Khalifa of Bahrain should take notice.  Washington may hesitate, it may equivocate, but it will not fail in the end to support the radical proposition that all people are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights.