The March on Washington was a protest march that took place in August 1963, when around 250,000 people showed in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. The March is also known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the event's objectives were to draw attention to prevailing challenges and inequalities faced by African Americans a century after emancipation. There were six groups that shared the credit for organizing the event. The big six, as the march organizers were called, were the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Congress On Racial Equality, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and the National Urban League.
Labor leader and civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph, who was the first president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, is credited with being the first to advance the idea of marching on the nation’s capital, but it was way before 1963.
New York City-based BSCP was the first black-led labor organization and it was instrumental in fighting southern segregation. Bayard Rustin had a legendary career in civil rights activism.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued the landmark Executive Order 8802 on June 25, 1941, establishing the President's Committee on Fair Employment and effectively ending that specific form of segregation, momentum for the march subsided.
The organizers seemed to know that uprisings become more likely to fail if they turned violent.
They knew that once protesters picked up guns, it would legitimize Washington's use of crushing violence. Public opinion is much more likely to justify opening fire and individual police or soldiers are much more likely to follow orders to shoot if the opposition is also shooting at them.
The March was also the occasion of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s iconic “I Have A Dream” speech.
King agreed to speak last but his speech was scheduled to be four minutes long though he ended up speaking for 16 minutes. His speech would become one of the most famous speeches of the civil rights movement.
The more peaceful the protest, the more likely that it will internally unify the cause as was the case for the March on Washington.
