August 28, 1963. Which side would you have been on?

[AthenaAwakened]

 The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom or "The Great March on Washington", as styled in a sound recording released after the event,[1][2] was one of the largest political rallies for human rights in United States history[3] and called for civil and economic rights for African Americans. It took place in Washington, D.C..Thousands of Americans headed to Washington on Tuesday August 27, 1963. On Wednesday, August 28, 1963. Martin Luther King, Jr., standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, delivered his historic "I Have a Dream" speech in which he called for an end to racism.[4]

The march was organized by a group of civil rights, labor, and religious organizations,[5] under the theme "jobs, and freedom".[3] Estimates of the number of participants varied from 200,000 to 300,000;[6] it is widely accepted that approximately 250,000 people participated in the march.[7] Observers estimated that 75–80% of the marchers were black.[8]

The march is credited with helping to pass the Civil Rights Act (1964)[9][10] and motivating the Selma to Montgomery marches which led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act (1965).[11]

Now we all have heard the last part of the speech and the singing and we may have seen the celebrities. And most everyone agrees now that the march then was right and righteous and everyone should have been on the side of Dr. King and the marchers.

But what about then?

Take the way back machine back to August 1963. Take your politics today and see if you really would have sided with King ...

or Wallace...

Or COINTELPRO...

or Malcolm X?

If you have doubts,

http://www.archives.gov/press/exhibits/dream-speech.pdf

Click the link for the WHOLE speech and feel free to add the speeches of other orators who spoke that day

 

[Bronzeage]

I would have been six years old, but my mother would have taken me. We probably would have been way in the back.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I would have been in The North, where there was no such thing as racism. *shifty eyes*

 

[Tom Sawyer]

I'd have been on the side with more beer.

For future reference, if you're going to protest something, bring beer and then I will be on your side and heartily endorse your product and/or service.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

If you transported us through time to be there at that time, I think most of us would side with what King was saying, or at least the jist of it. King's speech was about inclusion, working together, and striking down special treatment based on race. He phrased the whole thing in terms of cooperation and inclusion, exactly as Emily was saying in the other thread that it should be done to get change to happen.

This is a very stark contrast to what we tend to hear today from those who say they follow in his footsteps. I think the more interesting question would be what would King and his group have to say if they were transported forward in time to today.

 

[Ford]

I wasn't born yet, but not so long ago something happened to me that gave me a little insight into where I might have been back then.

One of the celebrities who was doing some of the singing at that march was a fellow named Peter Yarrow...at the time one third of Peter, Paul, and Mary. I got to interview him some months ago, and what was supposed to be a five minute interview promoting his upcoming concert turned into a half hour conversation about everything from music to bullying in school to the situation in the Middle East. Near the end of the conversation he told me "man, I feel like we're brothers of the spirit."


Where would I have been back then? It is hard to know, but I like to think I'd be there with my spirit brother.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

Let's take a look at where America and Americans were in August 1963.

January 14 - George Wallace becomes governor of Alabama. In his inaugural speech, he defiantly proclaims "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever"

January 28 - African-American student Harvey Gantt enters Clemson University in South Carolina, the last U.S. state to hold out against racial integration. (SIDENOTE: his daughter Sonja and I would meet some twenty years later and UNC Chapel Hill in AFAM 40, and becomes friends.)
April 3 - Southern Christian Leadership Conference volunteers kick off the Birmingham campaign (Birmingham, Alabama) against racial segregation in the United States with a sit-in.
April 12 - Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth and others are arrested in a Birmingham, Alabama protest for "parading without a permit."
April 16 - Martin Luther King, Jr. issues his "Letter from Birmingham Jail".
May 2 - Thousands of African Americans, many of them children, are arrested while protesting segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. Public Safety Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor later unleashes fire hoses and police dogs on the demonstrators.
June 11 - Alabama Governor George Wallace stands in the door of the University of Alabama to protest against integration, before stepping aside and allowing African Americans James Hood and Vivian Malone to enroll.
- President John F. Kennedy broadcasts a historic Civil Rights Address, in which he promises a Civil Rights Bill, and asks for "the kind of equality of treatment that we would want for ourselves."
June 12 - Medgar Evers is murdered in Jackson, Mississippi. (His killer, Byron De La Beckwith, is convicted in 1994.)
August 18 – American civil rights movement: James Meredith becomes the first black person to graduate from the University of Mississippi.
September 15 – American civil rights movement: The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, in Birmingham, Alabama, kills 4 and injures 22
October 8 – Sam Cooke and his band are arrested after trying to register at a "whites only" motel in Louisiana. In the months following, he records the song "A Change Is Gonna Come".
November 10 – Malcolm X makes an historic speech in Detroit, Michigan ("Message to the Grass Roots").
November 22 - Assassination of John F. Kennedy: In a motorcade in Dallas, Texas, United States President John F. Kennedy is shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, and Governor of Texas John Connally is seriously wounded. A few hours later Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson is sworn in as the 36th President aboard Air Force One, as Kennedy's body is flown back to Washington, D.C. All television coverage for the next 4 days is devoted to the assassination and its aftermath, the November 24 procession of the horsedrawn casket to the United States Capitol rotunda, and the funeral. Stores and businesses shut down for the entire weekend and Monday, in tribute

 

[AthenaAwakened]

Dr. King, 5 years after the march, in his own words

 

[AthenaAwakened]

Not everyone took King's side in 1963, and I'm not just talking about segregationists in the south.

Here is how National Review commented on the bombing in the October 1, 1963 issue of their biweekly Bulletin: “The fiend who set off the bomb does not have the sympathy of the white population in the South; in fact, he set back the cause of the white people there so dramatically as to raise the question whether in fact the explosion was the act of a provocateur – of a Communist, or of a crazed Negro. Some circumstantial evidence lends a hint of plausibility to that notion, especially the ten-minute fuse (surely a white man walking away form the church basement ten minutes earlier would have been noticed?). And let it be said that the convulsions that go on, and are bound to continue, have resulted from revolutionary assaults on the status quo, and a contempt for the law, which are traceable to the Supreme Court’s manifest contempt for the settled traditions of Constitutional practice.”

http://sanseverything.wordpress.com/2008/10/07/national-review-and-terrorism-revisited/

 

[ksen]

"crazed negro"

wtf?

 

[laughing dog]

I was just a young lad back then. I ran errands for the staffers and volunteers at the local SNCC. I know whose side I was one even back then.

 

[Togo]

Before my time.

It's hard to imagine being against King though, even given the climate of the time. Later, sure, but in '63?

 

[AthenaAwakened]

Dr. King from his 1963 book Why We Can't Wait

Whenever this issue of compensatory or preferential treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree, but he should ask for nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic. For it is obvious that if a man enters the starting line of a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some incredible feat in order to catch up.