Dan Snow's History Hit - The March on Washington

Episode Date: August 29, 2022

On August 28, 1963, some 200,000 people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. to protest the continuing inequalities faced by African Americans. The final speaker of the day was Dr Martin Luther King who would deliver one of the most famous orations of the civil rights movement—and of human history.Dr Clayborne Carson is a historian, founder of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, and now director of the World House Project. Having edited the Papers of Martin Luther King Jr., Dr Carson joins Dan to share what led to the historic march, his experience of being a part of the very crowd who witnessed the “I Have a Dream” speech, and the lasting influence that Dr King and the protest would have around the globe.This episode was produced by Hannah Ward, the audio editor was Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. On August the 23rd, 1963, more than 200,000 people gathered in Washington DC for a gigantic march, the so-called March on Washington, organized by African Americans seeking justice and economic opportunities. This was the march that helped build pressure that passed the great civil rights legislation of 1964 and 65, and of course, the march that featured the speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which has become one of the most celebrated speeches in history. In his speech, he quoted the US Constitution. He said he encouraged America to rise up and live up to its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.

And then he told the assembled masses and the people of the world watching, he told them about his dream. A dream in which, as he said, all God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we are free at last. In this episode of the podcast, I'm very lucky to be talking to someone who's not only a witness that day, who's not only a teenager standing in the crowd that day,

talking to someone who's not only a witness that day, who's not only a teenager standing in the crowd that day, but he's also got to know Dr. King's family and his archive better than anybody else. Dr. Claiborne Carson is a professor at Stanford University. He was asked personally by Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King's wife, to edit his personal papers after his assassination. And he's now the director of

the World House Project at the Centre on Democracy Development and the Rule of Law. It was great to talk to Dr Carson, ask him questions about that day as a participant, but also now as one of its most distinguished historians. Enjoy. Dr. Carson, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Can you tell me what it was like back in August 1963? You were there. Yes, I was. And I was only 19.

And this was by far the largest assemblage of people I'd ever seen in my life. And I was by myself. I didn't come with a group, so I could wander around and it was a really unique experience. You mentioned you're by yourself. Where do you come in from? Well, I had come from New Mexico to a conference in Indiana. And I basically hitched a ride with a group from Indianapolis. And that was about a thousand miles from Washington. So I just came with them overnight and arrived in the morning and then joined the crowd. And, you know, I'd grown up in New Mexico. So this was as many people as lived in the entire state. What was your personal and your family situation like in New Mexico?

Were you experiencing out West many of the same inequities that African-Americans were experiencing in the deep South or across industrial cities across America? Well, in New Mexico at that time, there were very few black people there. In my town of 13,000 people, I think there was only three black families. So this was more than I had ever seen in my lifetime and all in one place. So it was a real experience. Was Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech, it was one of many speeches, did it have the same immediate impact or is that something that posterity has endowed it with? I think it's a little bit of both. I think that it was a great speech. It was quite short, only maybe 14, 15 minutes, something like that. And it was at the

end of a long day of speeches. Quite frankly, I was looking for how am I going to get out of this crowd and find the bus I came on. And also, I think I was 19. So I was just as interested in John Lewis's speech because he was the youngster up there. He was the person representing the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And so I was fascinated by his speech. By the time Martin Luther King came on, I had heard about him as an orator. So I was looking forward to seeing, what are they talking about? Is this guy really that good?

And I could see that he was worthy of the reputation he had. Let's talk about the history first. It reminds me of that saying about when singer-songwriters or bands, everyone talks about overnight success, and it's actually taken them 20 years building up to that point of being widely recognized as having success. Can we go all the way back to the beginning of Dr. King and even before his career? Tell me about the mass march in 1941, another mass march of African Americans on Washington. Well, that was organized by A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin. One of the interesting things is that the 1941 march was to push President Roosevelt to hire black people to work in the war industries.

There was a thread of a march, but it never came off. It was a threat of a march, but it never came off. It's so interesting that Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph are still around 20 years later and helped really plan and stage this march in 1963. They had had this idea in their head for two decades. Finally, they were able to pull it off. And I think that's one of the reasons why it was so successful is that they were among the most experienced organizers of that time. And they'd called off their march in 1941 because Roosevelt had basically sort of given in or agreed and compromised,

agreed to give in some of their demands, right? Around establishing fair employment practices. Yes, yes. He had issued an order and it had a significant impact on hiring of black workers during the war. And in fact, it had a significant impact on my life because my dad was later drafted into the military and gained opportunities that he probably would never have had if he had not gone into the military. He ended up lieutenant colonel in the military. So this was a major change,

just like the March on Washington in 63. That was also a march for jobs and freedom. Jobs was part of the demand of the marchers. When I was growing up in the 80s, I still remember the idea that marches often did move the dial. And it's interesting you talk about this march or the prospects of March 1941 that changed things in the 60s. It feels today like everyone's always marching about. And it's like the governments around the world have worked out they don't have to worry about marches anymore. I don't know, like within the struggle for black freedom and justice in the US, are mass mobilizations like these marches important, do you think? Well, I think there's always the sense that this is important, especially when you come to the seat of government, when you come to Washington and you're marching on the National

Mall, that's right in front of Congress. Even the threat of it, I think, had some impact. Now, it could have worked the other way around. If it had turned to violence, it might have had a negative impact on Congress. But even then, it took another year before significant civil rights legislation was passed. The march did not have an immediate impact. Let's talk about the world in which the young Martin Luther King grew up and became a civil rights leader. Talk to me a little bit about his journey towards leadership. Well, first of all, I think it's good to know that his father and grandfather were leaders. They were significant civil rights leaders in their own right. So he came from a family of black ministers who used the pulpit as a way of reaching a larger audience and taking part in the civil rights struggles of the time. So I think he was prepared for that role,

but it was almost an accident that he happened to be in Montgomery, Alabama, when basically it was women who started this bus boycott. And he was selected to be the spokesperson for the boycott. He had nothing to do with starting it. In fact, he didn't ride the buses. So his father was rich enough to have a car. So he became famous because this was a boycott that went on for over a year and finally won the right to sit wherever you want on a bus. And even though that seems like such a minor gain, it was significant because it proved that if a black community could stay together and protest, they could achieve something. And that brought him national and international fame.

Yes, it was interesting that people in South Africa kind of picked up the idea that if you wanted to protest against a segregation law, you could just simply refuse to go along with it. The past law in South Africa was kind of stimulated by what happened in Montgomery. Nelson Mandela would later come to Detroit where he met Rosa Parks, who had initiated the Montgomery bus boycott. And he knew about Rosa Parks' role. He had heard about it as a young person in South Africa. That's a conversation at which I wish I'd been a flower on the wall. That's amazing. Yeah, I heard when he got off the plane, he said, Rosa, Rosa, because he knew that she lived in Detroit and she was in the crowd there waiting for him. Oh, wow. Tell us about Birmingham. Having gained notoriety in Montgomery,

tell us about Birmingham, Alabama and the next sort of stage of his career. Well, I think it's important to know that he was going through a tough period in his life. He had tried to initiate a campaign in Albany, Georgia that really failed. He had gone to jail, hoping that by going to jail, that would mobilize the community. And finally, he had to recognize that he wasn't going to win in Albany. But his minister friend, Fred Shuttlesworth, had said, you've got to come to Alabama because if you can win there, you can win anywhere. Because Birmingham, Alabama was called

Bombingham. This was a place where violence was used to beat down any kind of civil rights protest. So remarkably, he leaves this small town in Georgia, Albany, goes to this large city in Alabama, which has a reputation for fierce resistance. And the odds against him were large. He could have failed in Birmingham. Certainly, if he had failed in Birmingham, he would not have been invited to speak at the March on Washington. So that was a crucial turning point in his career that he was able to gain enough. People criticized him for not gaining more, but he gained enough concessions that he could come out of Birmingham and say, we succeeded. We got some concessions

in the toughest place, a strong hold of segregation. And if we can win in Birmingham, that means we can win anywhere. And as well as concessions, had he also demonstrated that he could build a coalition between African-American groups, liberal or progressive whites? Had he proved that his style of campaigning, if you like, was scalable? I think so. I think that what he offered was, he was coming at the end of a tradition or in the middle of a tradition of protest. coming at the end of a tradition or in the middle of a tradition of protest. And people like Dared Rustin had developed that over a long period of time. And I think what they recognize is that notion of nonviolent protest. You could put enough pressure without getting crushed. So nonviolence was a way of saying, we're discontented with this. We are willing to

go to jail if necessary, but we're not going to give up. So that idea, which he, of course, borrowed from Gandhi in India, was what allowed this movement to grow and eventually succeed. You mentioned being in jail. He writes his beautiful letter from Birmingham Jail, is now a very well-known canonical piece. And why is it that Birmingham leads to this big march on the nation's capital? Well, you can see that it has an effect throughout the nation. Birmingham was covered, and at that time,

there were only three networks in the United States. So it was much easier to get full coverage, but it could dominate the news. And people could see that particularly children in Birmingham were being beaten by police and hit with fire hoses. I think that affected enough people throughout the nation to know that this is something that's got to stop and that this is something where we have to really build upon it. And after Birmingham, when King goes to Chicago, there's 30,000, Los Angeles, 40 or 50,000, Detroit, 200,000 people waiting to hear him. 200,000 people waiting to hear him. So he becomes this celebrity after gaining this, you know, it wasn't much of a victory, but it was enough of a victory that he could go around the nation saying, look, this is what we did. If we get these kinds of mobilizations, we can begin to really bring about major civil rights reform. And it took a year, but it finally happened. Well, let's talk about civil rights reform because Kennedy was in the White House who had a sort of perhaps, I don't know, what do you think of his reputation for being basically on the right side of history when it comes to this? It's controversial in a way. He tried to

persuade the team organizing this march on Washington not to go ahead with it, right? persuade the team organizing this march on Washington not to go ahead with it, right? Last thing he wanted was for his presidency to be about civil rights. If you go back and look, just listen to John F. Kennedy's inauguration address. It's about the Cold War, about prevailing in the Cold War. So from his perspective, why should I get distracted into this battle with segregation in the South? That's going to hurt me because the South is a Democratic Party stronghold at that time. So the last thing he wanted was his own coalition to get disrupted by this battle over civil rights.

So he was definitely not in favor of the march. He basically recognized it was going to happen, whether or not he was in back of it. But once it became clear that it was going to happen, he wanted it to be nonviolent, because the last thing he needed was a major outbreak of violence. Kennedy was a reluctant civil rights proponent. He would have wanted his presidency to be about winning the battle with communism. And when you look at his speeches, he was very reluctant to take on that mantle of advocate of civil rights. But he was pushed in that direction. And Bobby Kennedy played a role in that because he felt that as attorney general, he needed to enforce national law, even in Alabama and Mississippi and the Deep South.

So I think Robert Kennedy played a crucial role because he saw that as his particular duty as attorney general to enforce federal law. as Attorney General to enforce federal law. It's very interesting that the dialogue between the leaders and the Kennedy brothers, they didn't end the march at the Capitol. So hauntingly today, given the events of last year, they didn't want the members of Congress to feel as if they were under siege. The march took place at the other end of the National Mall. The Capitol is at one end, the Lincoln Memorial is at the other end. Actually, the march organizers wanted it to be on the Capitol end and then decided, well, that would appear to be that they are putting pressure on Congress directly, and it might backfire in terms of public relations. So they agreed because there had been previous civil rights marches

to the Lincoln Memorial, and it was symbolically important. And they understood that it would be an appeal to the Congress, but Congress was, what is it, a half a mile away, a mile away? It was not directly an assault like we had last year on January 6th. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about the March on Washington, and I have a dream. Aeroplanes, spacesuits, condoms, coffee, plastic surgery, warships. Over on the patented podcast by History Hit, we bring you the fascinating stories

of history's most impactful inventions and the people who claim these ideas as their own. We uncover exceptional stories behind everyday objects. We managed to put two men on the moon before we put wheels on suitcases. Unpack invention myths. So the prince's widow immediately becomes certain. Thomas Edison stole her husband's invention and her husband disappeared around the same time. Can

only have been eliminated by Thomas Edison, who at the time is arguably the most famous person in the West. And look backwards to understand technologies that are still in progress. You know, when people turn around to me and say, oh, why would you want to live forever? Life's rubbish. I just think that's a bit sad. I think it's a worthwhile thing to do. And the thing that really makes it worthwhile is the fact that you could make it go on forever. So subscribe to Patented from History Hit on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to catch new episodes every Wednesday and Sunday. I'm Matt Lewis.

And I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans.

Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm really interested by the fact that the official title was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. And it reminds me of the discussions going on around the Democrat Party at the moment is if you live in a time where there is economic hardships being encountered by and experienced by many families, but also a kind of existential threat to the republic and democracy itself and threat how much balance do you give those two we hear this discussion like this is a kitchen table issue is that something that actually was going on amongst the organizers this march as well i think so one of the things that a philip randolph was a labor organizer so he was used to the notion of economics being at the heart of this. Baird Rustin was his main advisor. And actually, Baird Rustin would later write a book from protest to politics, advising Black people to kind of de-emphasize protest a bit, emphasize you have

an opportunity to exercise your political power. So that was his perspective. And I think that clearly the Kennedys would have wanted that to be the perspective of trying to work within the democratic establishment. But I think one of the things they recognized over time is that the political landscape of the United States changed dramatically because of the civil rights reforms, the protests. The 1964 Lyndon Johnson landslide election was the last time in American history a majority of white Americans voted for a Democrat. It hasn't happened since. So the day itself, we got the 28th of August, 1963. You were there.

How many people were alongside you? Well, I didn't count them at the time, but I heard it was 200,000. And I think that was a pretty good estimate. It really sold them all. I had never seen, as I said, that many people in one place at one time. And it's become more and more common,

you know, to, I think, the Earth Day protests later in the 60s and then the Million Man March. But at that time, there had never been anything quite like this. And you had, as you mentioned, the late, great John Lewis talking there as well as Dr. King. There were actors and singers and give me a sense of who else was speaking up there. Well, it was so interesting that my life brought me into contact with so many of them. Right before the march, I had met Stokely Carmichael, who later became a prominent activist. John Lewis, got to know him really well. There were so many people who at that time,

they were just part of the crowd and they were much more central to what was going on. I was just there by myself. But I think looking back, it's interesting when I think that 10 years later, I'm writing about that. I'm a historian. And part of what made that possible was that movement of opening up the possibility. I don't think I could have become a historian at Stanford University in 1963. There weren't any Black professors here at 1963, I don't think. So a lot of the opportunities that opened up 12 years later than that, Coretta King calls me on the phone and says, I'd like you to edit my late husband's papers. And now here I am talking about this as both a participant and historian who has written about it.

Let's just quickly talk about the I Have a Dream speech. He was scheduled to speak for four minutes. He went on for 16. And I think it's one of the most perfect speeches in the history of the English language. How off the cuff was it? Well, actually, it was about half and half. I have a draft of his original speech. It was handed out

to the press. It didn't have any of the, I have a dream part. There was a pretty good speech, but you can follow his speech and look at that early draft and see how he's responding to the crowd. He's looking out. And he had been told before, he said, you know, look, you're supposed to only speak seven or eight minutes at the most, but you're Martin Luther King. You're the last speaker. It's not like you're going to hold up the program if you go on a little bit longer. And I think he understood that that was kind of an invitation to him. You get the sense of the crowd. And if you feel like extemporaneous remarks are necessary. And it's so interesting that he did not prepare to give the most interesting part of the speech. It was off the

cuff. The way I look at it, he didn't prepare to give that, but he'd been preparing all of his life to give it. And is it a trope within his speeches that he talks about his dream? He embeds his dream in the language of the Constitution. Yeah, he had often given speeches about what he called the American dream. And you could see what that is. It's making real the promise of the Declaration of Independence. All men are created equal. All of that human rights language was part of the founding of the country. human rights language. It was part of the founding of the country.

So when he gets to that point where he's saying, let's make it real, here's our opportunity to turn this vision, this idealistic vision of America as a democratic, egalitarian society, that's the dream. So I think that he starts it out as the American dream. And actually, I've looked at his speeches and gradually the American dream becomes, I have a dream. And that happens about a year before he gives the speech in Washington. He starts not talking about abstractly the American dream. And he realizes it's much stronger to say, I have a dream. And I think that made the speech really special, as you have in making it personal, because then he's essentially saying, we have this dream,

and we can make it real. Three months later, Kennedy was killed. And then, as you say, it's up to Johnson, Kennedy's vice president and now president, to try and build a legislative concrete legacy for this march and this movement. How do you think the March on Washington influenced what came next? A lot. I think that Johnson recognized that that was a constituency. Lyndon Johnson became a civil rights president gradually because of his background in Texas during the Depression. that was rooted in his experiences as a teacher, actually, of kids who were poor. And by the time he came to Washington, he didn't have a lot of experience with Black people, but he had this basic notion that if you can build this coalition of Black Americans, the labor movement, all of

these people who were concerned about making the society more egalitarian, things like Medicare and opening up college opportunities, that was something important to him, what he called the Great Society Program. And looking back, it was surprising to some people that he came forward with this. It was probably shocking to other people that he came forward with this because civil rights was part of it and he was losing part of his coalition. And then, of course, he had the war in Vietnam. And maybe without the war in Vietnam, that coalition might have grown larger. He might have been able to negotiate the race problem because there were a lot of white Southerners who didn't like his civil rights policies. And the Republican Party

made that decision in 1968 to go after that vote. And so you had this massive movement of tens of millions of Southern white voters who had only voted for the Democratic Party in the first part of their life. And in the second part of their life, they only vote for the Republican Party. And that has changed the nature of American politics to this day. And Johnson lamented the fact that Vietnam killed the great society. So there was a legislative achievement before that successful Republican coalition. In 64 and 65, there was Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act. So there were firm legislative achievements.

What about culturally? As a young black man watching that, do you think it's as important as getting the law changed? Was encouraging white people to see you as a person? I think that that was a longer process. And looking back, I think that you have a real problem in terms of human rights, and that is to mobilize people to fight for their rights, you've got to build their consciousness as a group without rights. You have to build that sense that they need to struggle to become equal to everybody else. But in the process, you're also facing a backlash of people who are losing their privileged status.

And I think that that's what happened, is that at the same time you're opening the door for maybe tens of millions of Black people to vote for the first time in their lives, maybe tens of millions of black people to vote for the first time in their lives, they're also opening the door for white Americans to say, I don't want to be part of that, that I'm losing my privilege. I'm losing my sense of being on top here. And that's the backlash. How else do you explain somebody who, as I said, spends the first years of their adulthood voting for a Democratic Party? Never again do they vote Democratic. And that describes probably 20 million Americans.

And that has changed the nature of American politics. I guess the lesson there is, as Dr. King said in his famous letter from the Birmingham Channel that I mentioned, but injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. It's about encouraging people not to see the loss of privilege, but the gains that you can make through building a wider and bigger and better society. But, you know, that's saying let's move beyond American history. moved beyond American history. Slavery was part of American history, and that's what we're still dealing with, is that from the beginning, we were a republic claiming to be a democracy, or at least hoping to be a democracy. And that was not in the cards when your economy and when your very existence depends on dominating other people, not just

black people, but the native people of the land. And the America that white Americans grew up in was really based on the oppression of others. And they might not have admitted that, but that's the historical reality. And they didn't want to leave that behind. How much has changed? If you could go back to that 19-year-old and he could see you now, would he be ambitious for more? Would he be excited and happy? What do you think? I find it difficult to give a simple answer to that because that's part of the complexity of

being here. King's last question when he writes his last book, where do we go from here? And I would argue we haven't answered that question. Americans haven't answered that question. The world hasn't answered that question. But he posed it as the alternative chaos or community. And I would advise you to just pick up today's newspaper, look through the articles on the front page. Are we heading toward chaos? Are we heading toward community? Flip a coin. It's depending on what day you're looking at the newspaper, I guess. You see signs that we might be kind of figuring this out. Because King's idea, what he developed was the idea that we are working out right now in a project called the World House. He said, we're going to live our lives in this World House.

The question is whether it's going to be chaotic or whether it's going to be a community. That's our only choice because we're not, unless we're Elon Musk and people like that who can choose to live on Mars maybe, Musk and people like that who can choose to live on Mars, maybe. The rest of us are going to be on this fragile planet. And we'll either fight it out and destroy ourselves, or we'll kind of work it out. I think it is almost a flip of a coin right now. What about the young teenager, Claiborne Carson? Not yet Dr. Carson, not yet professor. What would he have made of where you are now? What would he have made of the advances? And would he have been ambitious for more? If you had told that 19-year-old that in a dozen years, you're going to be a professor at Stanford University, he would have said, yeah, I'm going to be living on Mars too.

Well, hey, that's not too late, Dr. Carson. You may go along for the journey on that one. Yeah, yeah. It was probably just as improbable at that moment that that would have been my future. Or that the wife of that guy up on the stage, Martin Luther King, his wife is going to call you on the telephone one day unexpectedly and change the course of your life. All of that would have been inconceivable.

I'm very grateful that you've taken the time to have a much less important phone call with me and tell me all about it. So thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Tell us more about the project you're working on, Dr. Carson. Right now, my project is called the World House Project. It's at Stanford. And right now, my project is called the World House Project. It's at Stanford. And what I've done is I've really began to focus on educating people about living in the World House. I mean, I know that's a very ambitious thing for me and my little team of people, but that's what we're doing is we're trying to build educational projects that make people understand a little bit more about the struggle to make the world better and about Martin Luther King and his life. So anyone who's interested in that, anyone wants to support it, you can just look up Clay Carson and the

World House Project at Stanford. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone. you