In Their Words: March on Washington Participants Look Back on Historic Day

“Dear Son,” she wrote to me. “I went through the war years, the relocation camp, with the loss of almost every civil right. ... We MUST take our place in this peaceful demonstration with over 100 other organizations because we are a visible minority and our participation would be meaningful. ... I will stand up and be counted, too. I hope you will be at my side.”

How could I say no?

Rutha Mae Harris, 82

Now: Singer and actress, former member of the a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock

Then: Member of the SNCC Freedom Singers

I was arrested three times before the march, spending 14 days in jail for nonviolent resistance to segregation. But I had a wonderful time in jail, because I hadn’t done anything wrong. I had been studying music, but I decided to pause my education to join the SNCC Freedom Singers. There were four of us, and we traveled 50,000-plus miles in nine months, covering 46 states, to fundraise and organize on behalf of the SNCC. The songs of the civil rights movement played a vital role because they kept us from being afraid. If you’re walking down the street and you see the police with billy clubs, you started singing, “Let no billy club turn me around,” “Let no policeman turn me around” and “Ain’t let nobody turn me around. We’re going to keep on walking, keep on talking, marching up to freedom land.”

Buses came from all over the country and snarled traffic on the way into Washington, D.C.

AP Images

Traveling by planes, trains, buses and cars

On Aug. 27, the eve of the march, participants began to arrive in the Washington area. No one knew how many people to expect, but organizers had planned for more than 100,000 marchers.

Rita Moreno

One thing I remember from our plane ride is that my friend James Garner, who was then a very famous TV personality, was nervous about doing this. We didn’t know what the repercussions might be. He was guzzling Pepto-Bismol on the airplane, but what I love is that he came anyway.

I was nervous too. But I also thought, Well, it may just be the end of a career, but bringing attention to these injustices is more important than one person’s career. I’m a human being and a Latina, and I felt, and I still feel, an allegiance with the Black community because all of us have had a very difficult time with respect to justice.

Bruce Hartford

The night before the march, I boarded a bus from New Haven to D.C. Some media outlets were reporting that no one would show up; others warned that rioters would turn the capital upside down. Filled with apprehension, none of us could sleep. Hours passed as I lay awake at the back of the bus, before I noticed the horizon was glowing red. I thought, What the heck is this? Are we heading into fire?

The glow was from people snaking up on one side of the highway, with flares and torches. They waved signs that read “We Shall Overcome” and “We’re With You.” They’d awoken in the depth of the night to salute us because, I imagine, they couldn’t attend the main event, which fell on a Wednesday. I still choke up thinking about those flares.

Norman Hill

At about 6 a.m., I was walking on the National Mall with Courtland Cox and Bayard Rustin toward the Lincoln Memorial. We were about a quarter of a mile away. Several reporters recognized Bayard and asked him what was happening. Where were all the people? Bayard pulled out a pocket watch and a piece of paper from inside his jacket. He looked at the watch and paper, back and forth, and said to the reporters that everything was right on schedule.

What the reporters didn’t know was that the paper was blank. Like the rest of us, Bayard had no way of knowing how many people would actually show up.

Courtland Cox

When we got to the Mall, no large groups had yet arrived. Bayard turned to me and asked, “Do you think anybody is coming to this thing?” A minute or two later, we saw NAACP youth marching with their signs, and the crowds began to pour in. We later learned most marchers were delayed in arriving because the highways were clogged with people trying to get to Washington.

Thomas L. Windham, 79

Thomas L. Windham

Glenn Asakawa/CU Heritage Center

Now: Retired psychologist, civic and civil rights activist

Then: College student and factory worker

It was the summer before my junior year in college, and I was working at a factory in Brooklyn. Most of the people there were part of the United Auto Workers Union, one of the sponsors of the march. So, the union provided transportation, and we went down on buses.

I was very proud on the ride. I was also anxious. At that time, protesters had become victims of intimidation, violence, murder. But by the time we got to the Lincoln Memorial and I saw that sea of people, all I could think was, This is purposeful.

Virginia Hammond, 83

Now: Church deacon and social justice volunteer

Then: NAACP member

I had taken a predawn bus from Philadelphia with a group of girlfriends from the NAACP. I was attending the march to stroll around, socialize and listen. I wasn’t a die-hard activist at the time, but I’ve always been an active community member — involved in my church, Girl Scouts, camp directing and my sorority.

When we got off the bus, it didn’t feel remarkable to me. I had no idea until much later that I was witnessing a century-defining moment in history.

Damon “Richard” Evans, 73

Now: Actor, singer; played Lionel on TV’s The Jeffersons and the young Alex Haley on Roots: The Next Generations

Then: Junior high school student

At 13, I was too young to do sit-ins at lunch counters. But my participation at this event, just attending and being there, was important to me. And my mother felt it was safe for me to go with my neighborhood church from Baltimore.

I came up in the age of Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals and Live From the Met on the radio. It was a white canvas, but I was beginning to see representation of Black people in the arts. And I was becoming aware that I was a young gay man. So, I was fascinated by the march, because this major event was being created and put together by Bayard Rustin, a gay Black man.

I remember the people all gathered around the Lincoln Memorial — men in shirts and ties, and women in dresses. I remember wheelchairs. Kids on the shoulders of their fathers. There was no separatism. Charlton Heston was at that march, Paul Newman, Lena Horne. It was just a rainbow coalition of all shapes, colors, identities.

Eleanor Holmes Norton

The day of the march, people kept calling our New York office for information, so I was chosen to be the last one there to answer. For that reason, I got to fly to the march. We had not been sure this march would be successful. But I could see from the window as we neared Washington that the march was going to work. We could see it in the buses coming in. And in the crowds.

Martin Luther King’s 16-minute speech became both an inspiration and a challenge to his contemporaries and to future generations of Americans.

AFP/Getty Images

A collective call for freedom

From a stage built on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, musicians such as Joan Baez and the Freedom Singers gave performances using a gigantic sound system installed for the day. In the afternoon, the march’s official program started with “The Star-Spangled Banner,” led by opera star Marian Anderson. Speeches followed, including a tribute to Rosa Parks and other heroines of the civil rights movement, and addresses from the leaders of the AFL-CIO, the National Urban League and the NAACP. The final speech on the program would be King’s.

Rita Moreno

At the Lincoln Memorial, I was sitting very, very close to Martin Luther King. Sammy Davis Jr. was near me. We were all sitting on folding chairs. I was so taken with the glory and the majesty of the day that I didn’t even think about the danger.

Ed Flanagan

I went to the march alone after working my shift as a waiter at a country club. I had a good spot close to the stage. I could hear the speakers and supporters saying “Amen” to each other, encouraging each other. I also was glad to see about a quarter of the people attending weren’t Black — they were our allies.

Bruce Hartford

The roar of the crowd’s singing is what sticks with me. Song was the movement’s most powerful unifier; if any CORE meeting got heated, we’d finish by singing, to leave the room united.

Norman Hill

I was particularly impressed by the opening speech of A. Philip Randolph. He talked about the gathering being a massive moral revolution for jobs and freedom, and I think that set the tone for the day.

Joyce Ladner

I was onstage for the speeches. What I remember most was that the speech of John Lewis, the SNCC leader who later became a congressman, was censored behind the scenes. The archbishop of Washington had received a copy ahead of time and wanted to remove some of the more inflammatory lines, like one about activists marching through the South “the way Sherman did.” John didn’t want to alter his message, but Randolph convinced him to moderate it for the good of the movement.

Eric Holder Jr., 72

Now: Attorney, chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, first Black U.S. attorney general

Then: Junior high school student

I watched the march on a black-and-white TV in Queens, New York. I was 12 years old. I remember John Lewis was one of the main speakers. He was an icon. Later, I would have the honor of getting to know him. He is as close to a secular saint as I think we could have.

Clarence B. Jones, 92

Now: Lawyer, coauthor of the new memoir Last of the Lions, cofounder and director emeritus of the Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice at the University of San Francisco

Then: Lawyer, political adviser and draft speechwriter for King

I was behind Dr. King onstage as he stepped up to the microphone with prepared notes in his hand. But after he’d delivered the first seven-and-a-half paragraphs, Mahalia Jackson, who was on the platform with us, shouted, “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin. Tell ’em about the dream!” I thought, Oh, Lord, those people don’t know it, but they’re about to go to church.

Clarence B. Jones

Courtesy Stonybrook Entertainment

Everything from Martin after that was extemporaneous. He’d used the phrase “I have a dream” in sermons and speeches at several previous public gatherings. But until the March on Washington, it never got such a response.

As I looked out at the sea of people, I was struck by the number of white people, roughly a quarter of the crowd, who were there to support our mission. Because of my experiences at previous demonstrations, I knew that a significant number of white supporters were Jewish. In fact, the speaker right before Dr. King was Rabbi Joachim Prinz, who reflected on his time in Nazi Germany by saying, “The most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence.”

I think of what these young Jewish activists’ parents and relatives went through in the Holocaust and of what my own people’s enslaved ancestors had gone through.

Bernice A. King, 60

Now: Chief executive officer of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change

Then: 5-month-old infant

There’s something people may not understand about my father’s “I Have a Dream” speech. He was not delusional when he started talking about the dream — a dream that some people feel was and still is impossible, given the conditions of our world. My father was a preacher. And preachers have a tendency to lay out the case and give you hope.

So, before the “I have a dream” portion of the speech, he conveyed that we had the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, but economically, Black people were still lagging behind, 100 years later. Not because of something we did, but because things were stripped from us. He’s giving you the reality, but then giving you his dream, including that his four children would live in a nation where they would not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. The hope. We have to eradicate those things that still lead to racial disparities in our nation and world.

The next day, newspapers prominently featured the demonstration on front pages.

The Jackson Advocate/newspapers.com; The Pittsburgh Courier/newspapers.com; The Boston Globe/newspapers.com

A ripple effect

After the marchers returned to their lives in the days, weeks, years and decades that followed, the march continued to resonate — both in marchers’ personal commitment to social justice, and in the laws and conscience of a nation.

Courtland Cox

Dr. King’s speech closed the march. After the crowd left, I remember a few dozen SNCC veterans singing “We Shall Overcome” at the Lincoln Memorial. I think that was an expression of solidarity and a way to recommit ourselves to the effort to change America. The march gave visibility to what we were doing. It was important. But I came from Mississippi to the march and returned there afterward. So, it didn’t change me personally. It just gave me more space in which to work.

Monte Wasch

After the march, I was on my way back to New York with friends, both Black and white. We staged a sit-in at a diner in Maryland known for its segregation policy. The owner called the cops, and we were ID’d, booked and fingerprinted and spent the night at the police station before the charges were dropped. That was my way of celebrating the March on Washington.

Thomas Windham

I’d say 95 percent of our factory workers in Brooklyn were Black men, but pretty much all the supervisors and foremen were white. The timekeeper was white. And I was very conscious of the distinction. So, at the march, when I had signed a pledge personally committing to “the struggle for jobs and freedom for all Americans,” that really meant something to me. It also meant something to my friends who watched the march on TV, because when I returned home to the South Bronx, everybody wanted to talk about it.

There was this sense of uplift, of pride, of hope replacing despair. It was now OK to talk about the oppression we were experiencing. Part of our cultural lexicon had been about having to get up every morning “to meet ‘the man’  ” or “to clean Miss Anne’s house.” But the talk after the march was, “Soon we won’t have to do that.”

Joyce Ladner

I went back to college in Mississippi the day after the event and continued my activism. The march was a momentary reprieve. Less than one month later, KKK members in Birmingham, Alabama, dynamited a Baptist church, killing four Black girls and injuring more than 20 other congregants. We weren’t fighting for integration. We were fighting for our lives.

Ed Flanagan

I told my parents afterward that I had attended the march, and they were OK with it, especially because I wasn’t harmed. Three years later, when I was in the military in Florida, a bunch of us wanted to go skating at a rink. I was not allowed in the facility. The march didn’t make overnight changes, but it showed us what was possible.

Virginia Hammond

Nearly five years after the march, Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis. When I rewatched footage of King’s final speech, these words struck me: “I’ve been to the mountaintop. … I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.” What anointing did that man have? What did he know that we didn’t? He knew the importance of what he was doing and how it was going to be a driving force for a multitude of people beyond him.

Louis Armmand

African Americans had been struggling for equality for centuries in one way or another. But for the people in my generation, I think the march was the difference between knowing about the struggle in an abstract way and having an opportunity to get involved personally. It activated many of us.

In the years after the march, I would go on to work in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi, where I saw people who, with a third-grade education, having only picked cotton for a living, become some of the most stalwart organizers and fighters in the movement. Because there was hope.

Rita Moreno

The march completely changed my life. That’s when I became an official activist. When I saw all those people who came by bus, and who hitchhiked there, I decided, Forever and ever, I will be a person who allows myself to show what I feel in public. I’m not going to hide it anymore. I mean, winning an Oscar was thrilling and wonderful. But this day was way more important. Way more.

Bernice King

You know, this was not just a march to bring people together. It was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It set the precedent for adding demands for legislation to mass demonstrations. That march was a blueprint for how you utilize mass demonstrations to bring about social change.

Eleanor Holmes Norton

Bayard Rustin was perhaps the only person in the country who could have organized that march the way he did. And it produced an extraordinary effect, because out of it came the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

I learned from the March on Washington that Congress is a responsive institution. It takes people pressing Congress to make Congress do anything. So, I very much value having been on the outside, now that I’m on the inside. The march reminds me how real change comes about.

Bruce Hartford

Before that day, I’d shied away from civil disobedience. The march was so powerful that it made me smash through the fear of losing out on a future job opportunity if I got into trouble. In the year after the march, I was arrested four times for nonviolent sit-ins to protest employment discrimination in California. I eventually moved to the South to work for Dr. King. As police attacked and tear-gassed us on the streets of Alabama and Mississippi, we would sing “We Shall Overcome,” echoing the songs and signs from that day in ’63. Journeying to D.C. showed me the true meaning of unity.

Rutha Mae Harris

Singing at the march was a wonderful experience — one I shall never, ever forget. Oh, it was indescribable.

I’m 82 now, and I’m still singing. I still tell people I was part of the movement. I can say that whatever freedom I have, I got myself. No one had to do it for me.

Todd Endo

I was, by far, the youngest person in the JACL delegation at the march. My mother was 49 at the time, and most participants were nisei like her — the children of Japanese immigrants.

I think that was my mother’s first big step in taking a visible and outspoken stance in the civil rights movement. Afterward she became much more active, and she inspired me to become more active too. I marched in Selma in 1965, and I’ve continued to work for social justice. Today five generations of Endos have participated in civil rights causes. When my mother joined the March on Washington, she found her voice, and she created a family tradition of striving for justice and equality for all Americans.

Robert Raben, 59

Now: President of the Washington, D.C.–based consulting firm the Raben Group, founder of the March on Washington Film Festival

Then: In utero

I wasn’t born until a few months after the march, but it has affected my life. Years ago when I was in Montgomery, Alabama, I met a woman who’d been an usher at Dr. King’s church. Our conversation got me thinking about how so much of our history is told through the generals, the leaders. I wondered, What if history were told through the foot soldiers — the people who risked their jobs to vote, or who walked for 381 days during a bus boycott, or who made thousands of box lunches and planned transportation for the March on Washington?

So, when I came home to D.C., a friend and I decided to create a documentary film festival about people like that: men and women who aren’t famous but who helped change a nation. We called it the March on Washington Film Festival, and we have done it every year for the past 10 years.

The festival is now online, and people everywhere can access it. AARP is a sponsor. The powerful questions these films raise are the same ones as for anybody who has been marginalized by race, gender or sexual identity: Who tells your story, what is that story, and are you in control over that?

Eric Holder

Watching the march on TV helped form my view of the world. It shaped my career decisions, especially the work I’ve done on voting rights. It made me believe in the value of protest and gave me a sense that if people came together, they could accomplish big things.

For sure, we’ve hardly reached the place we ought to be all these years later, but things are fundamentally different now than they were then, because of the commitment and courage of the people who organized and marched — John Lewis and so many others.

John Lewis could point to any number of things to show that his hard work as an activist and congressman had been meaningful. But at least one of them was that they made it possible for someone like me to become the U.S. attorney general. On my last day in office, in 2015, he came by and told me, “I’ve admired the work you’ve done.” And he hugged me and started crying. I cried too.

Damon Evans

Today we are still fighting for some of the same things. We still have not reached “there.” But I am so grateful that at such a young age, I could see people of different backgrounds and beliefs come together for one cause: equality for everybody.