Remembering the pledge

“Fellow Americans, we are gathered here in the largest demonstration in the history of this nation. Let the nation and the world know the meaning of our numbers.” A. Philip Randolph said, in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial, opening the monumental event. “We are not a pressure group, we are not an organization or a group of organizations, we are not a mob. We are the advance guard of a massive moral revolution for jobs and freedom.”

Through the magic of a 10” black and white television complete with rabbit ears, my baby girl and I, a brand new mother, watched and watched and watched. It was August 28, 1963, a hot summer afternoon at Highlands Air Force Base, New Jersey. Television was coming into its own. It was also one of the first events to be broadcast live around the world, via the newly launched communications satellite Telstar.

As I searched the crowd for my mother (Elizabeth Murphy Oliver, editor of the Afro-American newspaper), we watched the entire historic event unfold, the crowd escalating and evolving. We, all of America, had never seen anything like this. Blacks from every village and hamlet, big cities and little towns, the light folks and the dark folks, the professors and the students, the dock workers and the Pullman Porters, the United Auto Workers, AFL-CIO, bus after bus, on foot and in cars, gay and straight, men, women and children, Black, Brown, Red, Yellow and White, they came challenging the government of the United States. We were united as never before. It was the largest crowd to assemble in the Capitol in the history of America. No one knew what to expect. Holding onto my six month-old Marilyn, tears running down my face, all the while glued to the tiny screen, we just watched.



As the day went on the speeches sort of ran together. The most hard-hitting speech of the day was by John Lewis, which made the Catholic archdiocese very uncomfortable. Roy Wilkins, the acknowledged leader of the Civil Rights Movement also spoke, along with Whitney Young, A. Phillip Randolph, the leader of the March, and of course Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., who delivered his famous speech. After that day, the mantle of leadership shifted from Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, to the young minister Martin Luther King, Jr.

Looking back, I recall that there were very few women invited to participate except the
 singers. And at the last minute ‘a tribute to women’ was inserted into the program. Yet in city after city the SNCC workers were women. Fanny Lou Hamer, in Sunflower County, Mississippi, the woman who changed the face of the Democratic Party forever, had just gone thru the worst beating imaginable. She was not even mentioned by any of the speakers.

The words he, him, brothers, brotherhood and all men, ran throughout the speeches. And when Martin Luther King, Jr. did mention females it was “little girls and sisters”. Even Mrs. King said she watched the march from her hotel room.
 
“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 its colored people a bad check, a check that has come back marked insufficient funds.” The “returned check” part of the speech did not make headlines. That is what Blacks understood. For whites, the western press made the “I have a Dream” part what it has become today.

Of the 50 sentences in the speech only nine are about the dream. The mainstream media has reduced Dr. King from an activist, a challenger of the system to a dreamer.


I, for one, resent the mythical Martin Luther King, Jr., who the President Kennedy tried to persuade to cancel the march. “We want success in Congress, not just a big show at the Capitol. Some of these people are looking for an excuse to be against us; and I don’t want to give any of them a chance to say ‘Yes, I’m for the bill, but I am damned if I will vote for it at the point of a gun.’” Failing to stop it, Kennedy publicly embraced the march.

Our young people do not know the full measure of the man and the struggle. All they know is “I have a Dream”. This was, and is, the most insidious public relations ploy to reduce and diminish the entire movement. They labeled King a communist because he had the gall to challenge the American system. When that did not work, they labeled him a dreamer.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a dreamer, and dreams have to come first before there is any action. King inspired action; he was action. He was always in motion.



Also very troubling is the media’s portrayal of the March as Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, which misses all of the other people who made it possible. A. Philip Randolph first planned a March on Washington in 1941 to protest against governmental hiring practices that excluded African-Americans from federal employment and federal contracts and to demand jobs and freedom. Because of this, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, which banned discrimination in the federal government and defense industries in June 1941.

As a result of the groundwork laid 22 years earlier for the 1941 March on Washington, A. Philip Randolph was prepared for the leadership role he held in the 1963 March on Washington. With Bayard Rustin as the main organizer of the march, Randolph was able to unite the many Civil Rights groups and Union leaders that comprised this national call for masses of people to take action.

Unless you lived through it, you cannot know how many pure souls and tortured bodies encompassed that moment in time. George Cooper wrote:


Jim Crow was the name of the game. Everything was separate; nothing was equal. Segregation was in full swing. There were white and black drinking fountains, white and black sections in the railroad stations, the bus station; everything.  And there was no “choice” that you had was to try to make the best of it or get in trouble. Prejudice was something we lived with every day of our lives.

 
What counted most at the Lincoln Memorial was not the speeches, eloquent, as they were, but the pledge of a quarter million Americans, black and white, to carry the civil rights revolution into the streets. The task became the fulfillment of the pledge through nonviolent uprisings in hundreds of cities.

You asked if I was there.  In the shadow of the Great Emancipator, on that 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, every heart and every soul of Black American was there.

I stood in front of my television, raised my hand, took the pledge and continued the revolution in the streets.  I have been on the stony road for the past 50 years.

As we come to the commemoration of the March on Washington, do I sound upset? I am! As Past President of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Coalition-Hawai`i, I speak to audiences at every level, radio, television, legislators, teachers, children of every age, education, racial background and ethnic mix, all of which know “I have a dream” and nothing else. No one ever asks me if the check, which came back marked insufficient funds, has been paid? No one ever asks me if we are still on that lonely Island? Or what does it mean to be the veteran of creative suffering? Absolutely not one person; not one person, has ever asked me about the “Demands of the March on Washington (pdf)” as read by Byard Rustin and presented to President Kennedy; or “The Pledge” as read by A. Phillip Randolph and everyone in attendance vowed to live by. Does anyone still have a copy of the pledge? No, they are lost in “I have a dream”.

Here’s The March on Washington pledge, which was printed on thousands of postcards, calling for nonviolent protest, peaceful assembly and redress through legal actions.

I pledge that I will not relax until victory is won.
I pledge that I will join and support all actions undertaken in good faith in accord with the time-honored Democratic tradition of non-violent protest, of peaceful assembly, and petition, and of redress through the courts and the legislative process.
I pledge to carry the message of the March to my friends and neighbors, back home and arouse them to an equal commitment and equal effort.
I will march and
I will write letters.
I will demonstrate and
I will vote.
I will work to make sure that my voice and those of my sisters & brothers ring clear and determined from every corner of our land.

As the Past President of The Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and a Member of The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee I bid you peace.