250,000 Americans arrived in Washington D.C. to highlight America’s Racism and Inequality…..
Decades later America STILL has problems and after the last President?
Courts and some Lawmakers are working HARD to get rid of some advances in those two area’s and others are trying erase history….
Sixty years ago, they converged on the National Mall from across the country, to demand their nation fulfill the promise of the American Dream for all.
Some arrived with intent, others by happenstance. They were college students and college dropouts, activists who organized in city offices and in sharecropping shacks, workers on Capitol Hill and at the post office.
An estimated 250,000 Americans in all arrived by bus, by train and on foot to participate in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Together, they forged a cornerstone moment in American history and in the struggle for African American equality that enslavement and Jim Crow had long denied.
[More than 1,800 congressmen once enslaved Black people. This is who they were.]
The March on Washington’s 60th anniversary arrives Monday, amid a rise in white nationalism, after George Floyd’s murder reignited protests and conversations about racism and inequality, and as the United States bitterly debates the teaching of the nation’s past.
“The only way you break the cycle,” said marcher Patricia Tyson, then 15 and now 75, “is to understand your history and talk about it.”…
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“I think that people don’t really understand that the March on Washington wasn’t just a celebration. It really was a protest march,” said Aaron Bryant, a curator at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
To some, the march was radical and prompted fears of violence; to others, it wasn’t nearly radical enough. It was a political gambit to pressure Congress, with some demands that look familiar today: job training to “defeat unemployment and automation,” an increase in the federal minimum wage, and robust civil rights legislation that included public desegregation, protections for Black voting rights and “decent housing.”
Organizers were aided by a transformative bit of technology: the television.
[From 2013: President Obama, thousands celebrate 50th anniversary of March on Washington]
Few histories are complete, and this account cannot be, either. Memories can fade or reshape over the decades; the speakers and the older attendees that day are gone.
But this is not “ancient history,” Bryant said.
Here, 60 years later, is the March on Washington, in all its risks, conflicts and hopes — and a legacy that still lives.
But more recent battles over gerrymandering and additional requirements making voting more difficult underscore ongoing voting rights challenges, despite the progress made since the march, advocates say.
“I would have hoped we were further along than we are, which does not mean that we’ve not seen some progress over 60 years and really in relationship to the vision that my father enumerated of freedom and justice and equality for all humankind,” said Martin Luther King III, the chairman of the board of the Drum Major Institute and the son of the prominent civil rights leader.
“But I can’t imagine that he would have envisioned necessarily that in 2023 that our nation would be at loggerheads in relationship to fighting to protect and preserve democracy, fighting to expand the right to vote, to make it easier to vote as opposed to making it harder to vote as some states have done, fighting to regain the right to choose, fighting just for people to have basic rights, the LGBTQI community and the list goes on and on,” he continued.
A recent standoff over Alabama’s congressional district map has demonstrated both the success and difficulties for voting rights activists….
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“The story of civil rights and voting rights is one of cyclical progress, or cyclical movements, so it’s not a story of linear progress. As you push forward, there is always a moment of retrenchment,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, interim co-director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project.
Lakin said she’s seen attempts to dilute the Black vote in many places in the South, including Alabama, arguing that redrawn maps in those places don’t reflect the way their demographics have changed over the years.
“When you talk about voting and redistricting, there’s still this question around how race is being used as a tool by the conservative movement in preventing access to voting,” said Derrick Johnson, CEO and president of the NAACP.
Activists underscored the significance of the Voting Rights Act in changing conditions for people of color whose constitutional right to vote had been undercut for decades, but efforts have been underway since then to chip away at aspects of the law….
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As America diversifies, “pressures that are being put on how we define rights, and how essentially policy gets executed, seem often to be seen through this lens of us versus them and not us, as a whole as a country,” Crayton said.
“These are people who are fellow Americans, and we’re here together as part of an experiment that, you know, puts us together — as John Lewis would say — in a house together as a family, and so either we’re going to be a family or not.”….
image…LIFE
I was there (although I did not hear “I Have a Dream” live but on a record issued by the organizers several months afterwards.
“We can never be satisfied so long as the Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and the Negro in New York City has no one for whom to vote.”
Amen….
Wow! Didn’t know you were at the March Dave.
How great to be witness to such history. Even if you didn’t get to hear MLKs speech live.