The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

50 years ago today Martin Luther King Jr. gave his monumental I have a dream speech. We rightfully commemorate this day as a high water mark in the civil-rights movement of the late 50’s and the 60’s. The best way to honor the march, the man and the speech is to seek a better understanding of them as they actually were.

I make the distinction between the way it is popularly contrived and the way it actually was, because much of the civil rights movement, with its greatest moments and leader being no exception, have been sealed in a tomb of idolatry crafted by aliens to the movement.

We celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. day every January 20^th, we teach our children about the civil rights movement in school, and we think upon the good works each in their neat little boxes kept carefully away from anything else.

The truth is that MLK had far more to say to us than just the promotion of equal rights for all, as did the march at which he made his famous speech. What we colloquially call “the march” was actually known as “the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” and if you had not guessed from the name, the focus was not actually so much equality under the law but justice in the economy.

It was the brainchild of A. Phillip Randolph, a labor organizer who with the help of the Negro American Labor Council sought to hold many marches on Washington.

Protest stretched back to the March on Washington Movement, which Randolph initiated to protest employment discrimination during the Second World War, and it was renewed in the 1960s by the Negro American Labor Council, a nearly forgotten organization that Randolph and other black trade unionists formed to protest segregation and discrimination in organized labor. When Randolph and other trade unionists proposed a “March on Washington for Jobs,” however, they faced resistance from other black activists who feared that such mobilization would detract attention and resources away from the campaign that Martin Luther King and others were planning to protest segregation and legal discrimination in the South. Anna Arnold Hedgeman, a black feminist who had directed Randolph’s campaign against employment discrimination in the 1940s, convinced him to meet with King and plan a demonstration that could address “both the economic problems and civil rights.

Indeed it was these black union members who pulled it together, selling bus tickets and informing the community of the event. While the focus was on equal rights, without the efforts of the leftist labor movement, the march may very well have been just another forgotten protest.

This is one of the march's biggest lesson's I would argue. That without a preexisting social structure ready to do the work of organizing, major victories may be fewer and further between. 

The legacy of King himself is very similarly whitewashed. A radical pacifist in nature, King's core beliefs shown through within the "Dream" speech. He called upon the US to end its campaign in Vietnam.

The man who said that his dream of equality was "deeply rooted in the American Dream" also believed the American government, with what he saw as its weapons testing in Vietnam, was on par with "the Germans [who] tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe." In the same speech, King said that, if U.S. actions were to continue, "there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam."

King was derided in mainstream media for the negative attention he brought to the war effort and connecting it with civil rights. King knew though that the two were not so seperate. The same values that allowed for the mistreatment of American minorities allowed for the use of dehumanizing effects of war in Vietnam. 

When King died in Memphis, he was actually there to support striking sanitation workers. His leftist tendencies and willingness to speak out against the war was what led the FBI to track him day and night. 

We do not of course know why King was killed and I don't care to speculate, but it is true that dead men tell no tales. On this day of remembrance then the best we can do is seek a deeper understanding of what MLK Jr. and the march were really about.