It was hard to flip through the TV channels this week without hearing a cable panelist opine about the meaning of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington or the country’s racial and economic progress since Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.
But it is a small and ever-shrinking club of public figures who can speak with firsthand authority about both the day of the march and the intervening years.
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They were there on Aug. 28, 1963 — lawmakers, activists and community stalwarts who have remained active in public life — and many will be at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial Wednesday as the country’s first black president, Barack Obama, marks the anniversary with his own address.
(PHOTOS: 20 March on Washington moments)
Obama’s address is set to be the centerpiece for the march commemoration. And for those remaining participants from 1963, the sense of progress Obama’s presidency represents is validation that the dream King so famously spoke of has, to at least a great degree, come true.
“I am very encouraged about what the president will say,” said Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), the last living speaker from the march. “I’ve had a conversation with him. He called me a few days ago and he’s going to say all of the right things, but I believe, I truly believe, that his presence as the first African-American president will be a speech unto itself.”
Lewis was the 23-year-old chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee when he spoke at the march. Now 73, his claim as last living speaker underscores the generational shift the modern civil rights movement is undergoing — a changing of the guard that makes these 50-year-old memories of a historic moment in time all the more precious.
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They are memories that range from the mundane details that oddly stick to one’s mind’s eye to a dawning sense of history in the making. Julian Bond worked for SNCC under Lewis in 1963 and described simultaneously appreciating the historical significance of the march and forming memories of granular details of the day.
“I had two responsibilities,” said Bond, who in later years would serve as a Georgia state lawmaker and a chair of the NAACP. “One of them, and I hate to say this, was giving Coca-Cola to the movie stars, and one of my happy memories of that day was giving a Coca-Cola to Sammy Davis Jr., and having him hold his hand like a gun, you know what I mean, and point at me and he said, ‘Thanks, kid.’ ”
Virginia Ali, co-founder of D.C. institution Ben’s Chili Bowl, also remembers a touch of star power.
“I was there, heard Dr. King’s speech, heard Peter, Paul and Mary and Mahalia Jackson sing and the other speeches,” Ali said at a celebration of the restaurant’s 55th anniversary last week. “It was a great day.”
(PHOTOS: Scenes from the March on Washington)
Bond’s other duty was distributing copies of the speeches to journalists seated near the base of the memorial, and he recalled unsuccessfully pitching them a unique angle on Lewis’s remarks.
“I noted to them that John was probably the only person who was going to say ‘black people’ as opposed to ‘Negroes’ or ‘colored people,’ which was the fashion of the time,” Bond said, “and we thought that made us more militant than the other organizations and I was sad that none of the journalists I pointed this out to seemed to think it made any difference at all.”
“We thought we were the cat’s meow,” he added with a laugh.
(Simon: King: Too far, too fast, just right)
Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) was another SNCC worker who helped organize the march under the late activist Bayard Rustin. At the last staff meeting before the march at planning headquarters in New York, Rustin asked someone to stay overnight to man the phones, Norton said.
“I volunteered because as a native Washingtonian, I knew that meant I would get to fly,” she said. “In flying, I would get an early sense of whether there were people gathering. … I didn’t see anything that enabled me to envision the 250,000 people that came, but I did see lots of clumps of people that made me believe, yes, they’re really going to.”
When she arrived, she went straight to the march and witnessed the speeches from inside the Lincoln Memorial, she said. But that’s not what she remembers most.
“It was looking from the memorial itself and recognizing that, first, I could not see the end of the crowd,” Norton said.
Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was a college student and budding activist at the time of the march, pointed out that although it may be easy to remember the event as a high-water mark of the civil rights movement, it came before many of the movement’s key legislative victories and knottier agenda items like housing and poverty.
“People don’t know that the dream of ’63 was not the dream of ’68,” Jackson said. “The dream of ’63 was to overcome, simply, barbarism.”
Some movement veterans went further than Lewis in specifying what they want to hear from Obama when he speaks today, highlighting the wide-ranging constituencies that will be watching the president closely. Jackson floated voting-rights issues and student-loan debt. Norton mentioned District of Columbia governance issues and post-recession income inequality. “It hits a theme that unites racial barriers,” she said.
Bond took a broader view.
“I think he’ll try as he’s done in the past to say to all Americans this is unfinished business,” he said. “This business of race is unfinished, and we’ve got to attack it as best we can and as strongly as we can and all of us are implicated in it.”
Jacqueline Corba and James Arkin contributed to this report.
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