Martin Luther King at the march on Washington in 1963. (Photograph: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORB)The rented run-down former church on West 130th Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem, from which Bayard Rustin organised the 1963 March on Washington, "ran on adrenaline and excitement", says Rachelle Horowitz, who organised the transport for the event.It was very exciting and frenetic ... with everybody working from early in the morning till late into the night. It was very collegial, very primitive and very egalitarian.
At the end of each day there was a meeting during which Rustin would inform the young activists on developments and they would tell him what they had achieved. The closer they got to the date of the march, the broader and more moderate the coalition supporting it became and the less militant the nature of the march would become.
While it would be ludicrous to draw direct parallels between Obama and King (King was a pacifist, Obama has a kill list; King was protester, Obama is president; King had a dream, Obama has drones) they do, however, have one thing in common: their ability to speak across the racial divide.
Originally conceived as a two-day affair that would involve acts of mass civil disobedience, a march around the White House and a speaker's slot for an unemployed worker, rapidly became a one day demonstration with speakers and singers.
Each time Rustin announced that yet another radical element had been dropped, his young staff would berate him, part in jest, part in frustration as a "sell out". "We'd shout: 'Oh Bayard, you're turning it into a circus!'" Horowitz says, laughing now.
Ever the coalition builder, Rustin explained:
What you have to understand is that the march will succeed if it gets a hundred thousand people – or 150,000 or 200,000 or more – to show up in Washington. It will be the biggest rally in history. It will show the black community united as never before – united also with whites from labor and the churches, from all over the country.
But there was one thing on which he would not compromise. There would be no politicians speaking from the platform that day, he insisted. If they came, they would come to listen, not to lecture.
So President Obama's appearance at the podium today to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the march illustrates a significant difference in what has changed over the past 50 years. Half a century ago, the keynote speaker Martin Luther King took to the Lincoln Memorial to speak truth to power. Today the keynote speaker is a black man who represents power. This event, of course, is of a more ceremonial nature than Saturday's event in the same place. And yet there, too, the marchers were spoken at by representatives of the political class: including Attorney General Eric Holder (who's black) and Democratic Minority House Leader Nancy Pelosi, among others.
It would be foolish not to acknowledge the progress this represents. Not only did the civil rights movement make it possible for African Americans to vote in the large numbers that would help Obama win in southern states like Florida, North Carolina and Virginia; it was also responsible for the affirmative action that would get them into college and help them land the kinds of jobs in both the public and private sectors from which America draws many of its politicians.
Nonetheless the sight of civil rights veteran Julian Bond having his mic cut off after just two minutes while Holder got half an hour on Saturday also tells a a different story. For when Obama takes the mic today he will personify, among other things, the ability of individual black Americans to advance even as the movement that might enable collective gains for black people as a whole has perished.
Please continue this article here: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/08/28-7
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"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967
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