March on Washington: 50 Years Later, Has the Dream Been Realized?

By Mitch Potter, The Star

26 August 13

Martin Luther King Jr.'s mesmerizing call for racial harmony crowned an unlikely day that placed employment foremost on the agenda, march organizer Stanley Aronowitz recalls.

t is easy to forget, looking through a lens 50 years long, that what is now widely regarded as America's most cherished speech wasn't just about freedom.

Yet the inconvenient truth half a century later is that Martin Luther King Jr.'s mesmerizing call for racial harmony from the steps of Washington's Lincoln Memorial crowned an unlikely day that placed employment foremost on the agenda.

America is still debating how much of King's "dream" has taken hold in the ensuing decades. But for many who helped organize the historic March on Washington For Jobs and Freedom of Aug. 28, 1963, modern economic reality remains the bitterest pill to swallow.

"On a scale of 1 to 10, Americans as a whole have gone from 1 in 1963 to minus-3 in terms of economic well-being. And African-Americans today are now at minus-5," said longtime labour activist, academic and author Stanley Aronowitz, 79, who spent months behind the scenes 50 years ago helping build the unlikely coalition that descended on the capital.

"The sad truth is that black Americans made economic gains from World War II through the 1960s and since then it has been a disaster. And for working-class whites, it hasn't been a whole lot better," he said.

"A significant portion, perhaps 20 per cent of African-Americans, benefitted tremendously from the civil rights movement. But the vast majority paid the steep price of deindustrialization. With the decline of a long list of cities - Detroit being the poster child - they fell behind the growing gap between rich and poor."

Washington is cluttered this week with events marking the 50th anniversary, starting with an official gathering of King's heirs and fellow travellers Saturday morning intended to "Realize The Dream."

Three living presidents - Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter - are scheduled to speak Wednesday at the Lincoln Memorial for the Let Freedom Ring Commemoration.

But the tone of celebration will be tempered by grim economic analysis, including new Pew Research Center data that concludes "the economic gulf between blacks and whites that was present half a century ago largely remains."

A trove of rich scholarship is accompanying the anniversary, including several new books that reassess and celebrate many of the crucial but less heralded figures behind that astonishing day, including A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin.

Rustin - black, gay and a pacifist - looms largest in these reassessments. It was he who introduced King to Mahatma Gandhi's teachings of non-violence. And it was he who was the chief organizer for the march of 1963, when all of official Washington braced for an eruption of violence, awaiting chaos that never came.

Aronowitz became a player in that back story when Rustin appointed him labour co-ordinator for the march, charged with persuading unions to join the controversial gathering. It was, Aronowitz remembers, an odyssey fraught with fear and apprehension, as unlikely partners were enlisted, one by one, to join the campaign.

"The media's obsession with those four words - 'I have a dream' - is understandable," Aronowitz told The Star. "But major events in history always have a back story.

"Mine was to travel around the country and enlist the support of major unions. And later, I was deputized by Bayard Rustin to sit down in Harlem with (militant black leader) Malcolm X and try win his tacit support for the rally."

But the many fragments of what would become, for a time, a cohesive civil-rights movement came together with distrust, said Aronowitz. Welding those two words - jobs and freedom - under a single banner set off alarm bells on all fronts.

"The unions needed 'jobs' to be part of the message. But we were still in the grip of Cold War thinking, and Martin Luther King Jr. and his leadership feared the support of unions would be interpreted as a Communist front," he said.

"At the same time, the idea of a massive march in Washington was, for many union leaders as well as many liberals, a very suspect kind of activity. The whole idea of direct action was still very new and controversial.

"And then you had many people on all sides worried that putting jobs and freedom together would be dangerous and damaging to John F. Kennedy. The fear was it would embarrass the Kennedy administration just as they were getting ready for the 1964 election and damage the Democratic Party's chances of re-election."

Aronowitz, then a 29-year-old leader with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, criss-crossed the country, winning the first glimmer of support - and hard cash contributions - from the autoworkers, the longshoremen and meat cutters unions.

His next assignment upon returning his native New York City was to relay a message to Malcolm X, whose contempt for the emerging civil rights movement's emphasis on integration was apparent to all.

"We sat down in a lunch room in Harlem and I asked Malcolm X for his support, as instructed. He said, 'Is my support being solicited officially?' I said, 'No.' He said, 'Do you want my endorsement publicly?' I said, 'No' again.

"He burst out laughing. And then he gave me a lecture - not a bad lecture - about what we were doing. His position was this was all a cop-out, an accommodation to the Kennedy administration, which he felt had no interest in enacting any legislation on black freedom."

That was the public Malcolm X. But privately, said Aronowitz, Malcolm X came around to seeing the march as useful. That initial overture let to telephone conversations between Malcolm X and Rustin.

"The result was that they agreed on a number of buses and that Malcolm would use his influence to fill them and send them to Washington. And it happened. For the record, his people came out."

Aronowitz, who went on to become professor of sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center, remains a radical small-d democratic intellectual to this day with more than 20 books to his name. He looks back on those formative civil rights moments with a mix of pride and misgivings over what was and what might have been.

"(Americans) are 320 million people today - and a large portion of that population feels great frustration over wage stagnation and the millions of homes that have been repossessed by the banks," he said.

"Yet we are also a country whose labour movement is enslaved to the Democratic Party for no good reason I can see. Americans submit to authority. We believe capital is omniscient. When we put 'jobs' and 'freedom' together in 1963, this isn't quite the future we envisioned."