THE NATION

CIVIL RIGHTS The March's Meaning

The march on Washington was a triumph. But after everybody agreed on that, the question was: Why?

Hardly in terms of immediate results, since there were none. The battle cry of the march was "Now!" Seas of placards demanded Negro equality--Now! Speakers demanded action--Now! Cried John Lewis, 25, leader of the militant young Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNICK): "We want our freedom--and we want it NOW!"

But Now! remained a long way off. It would not come today, tomorrow, next month or next year. This was made starkly clear as the leaders of civil rights organizations paid morning calls on Capitol Hill's most powerful citizens. It was made just as starkly clear after the march, when the civil rights leaders went to the White House to see President Kennedy.

To all, the civil rights leaders made specific requests: they demanded passage of the Kennedy Administration's entire civil rights package, including its controversial section banning discrimination in public accommodations. But even the Kennedy package was inadequate: the Negro leaders wanted to add to it sections that would 1) set up a federal fair employment practices commission, and 2) give the Justice Department vast power to intervene in almost all civil rights disputes. From the Capitol Hill leaders, and from the President, the visitors got polite words--and polite refusals.

Wherein, then, lay the triumph of the march? Civil rights leaders themselves had a hard time putting it into words. "We subpoenaed the conscience of the nation," said Martin Luther King Jr. The march was informal, often formless--yet it somehow had great dignity. It had little of the sustained suspense of an astronaut shoot or a national political convention--but it built, despite moments of boredom and restlessness--to an emotion-draining climax. It was in the probable effects on the conscience of millions of previously indifferent Americans that the march might find its true meaning.

Beginning of a Dream

The march from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, a distance of about eight-tenths of a mile, had been scheduled to start at 11:30 a.m. But at least 20 minutes before then, a group of Negroes started strolling away from the Monument grounds on the way to the Memorial. Hundreds, then thousands and tens of thousands, followed. Constitution and Independence Avenues were transformed into oceans of bobbing placards. Some marchers wept as they walked; the faces of many more gleamed with happiness. There were no brass bands. There was little shouting or singing. Instead, for over an hour and a half, there was the sound of thousands of feet shuffling toward the temple erected in the name of Abraham Lincoln.

At the Memorial, the first order of business was a program of professional entertainment. Folk Singers Joan Baez, Josh White, Odetta, Bob Dylan, Peter-Paul-and-Mary rendered hymns and civil rights songs.

Now to the platform came Singer Mahalia Jackson. First she sang a slow, sorrowful Gospel song titled I've Been Buked and I've Been Scorned. Her voice was marvelous, but her impact was more in her manner. Near tears, she moved her huge audience to tears. But in the very next breath, she would break into an expression of expectant happiness. When that happened, people who had been sobbing a second before began laughing, sharing in her expectancy.

Mahalia was hard to follow--and there probably was only one person in the civil rights world who could have done it quite so successfully. His introduction was drowned out by the roaring cheers of those who saw him heading toward the speakers' platform. He was Atlanta's Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

"The Negro," he said, "lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity and finds himself an exile in his own land." King continued stolidly: "It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment and to underestimate the determination of the Negro. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality."

Already, King's particular magic had enslaved his audience, which roared "Yes, yes!" to almost everything he said. But then, King came to the end of his prepared text--and he swept right on in an exhibition of impromptu oratory that was catching, dramatic, inspirational.

"I have a dream," King cried. The crowd began cheering, but King, never pausing, brought silence as he continued. "I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood."

"I have a dream," King went on, relentlessly shouting down the thunderous swell of the crowd's applause, "that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Even after King finished, there were some final ceremonies. But to all effective intents and purposes, the day was over. Obeying their leaders' injunctions to leave town as soon as the official ceremonies had ended, the demonstrators made their way back toward their trains, buses, planes and cars. It was a quiet night in Washington--after a day that would never be forgotten.

THE PRESIDENCY "The Government Still Lives"

Over Nob Hill and the Harvard Yard, across Washington's broad avenues and Pittsburgh's thrusting chimneys, in a thousand towns and villages the bells began to toll. At U.S. bases from Korea to Germany, artillery pieces boomed out every half hour from dawn to dusk in a stately, protracted tattoo of grief.

It was the kind of feeling that words could hardly frame. At Boston's Symphony Hall, Conductor Erich Leinsdorf laid down his baton, raised it again for the funeral march from the Eroica. On a Washington street corner, a blind Negro woman plucked at the strings of her guitar, half-singing, half-weeping a dirge: "He promised never to leave me . . ."

Later the words came, torrents of them. But only two were really needed. A Greek-born barber said them in his Times Square shop: "I cry." A woman said them in another way on London's Strand: "My God!" Jacqueline Kennedy said them as her husband pitched forward, dying: "Oh no!" A Roman Catholic priest said them with irrevocable finality outside the Dallas hospital where he had just administered the last rites to John Fitzgerald Kennedy: "He's dead."

In the U.S. Senate, Chaplain Frederick Brown Harris mounted the rostrum and placed a single sheet of scrawled notes before him. "We gaze at a vacant place against the sky," he said, "as the President of the Republic goes down like a giant cedar." Then he recalled the words that Ohio Representative James A. Garfield spoke on the morning that Abraham Lincoln died in 1865. "Fellow citizens," said Garfield, who was to die by assassination himself 16 years later, "God reigns, and the Government at Washington still lives."

So it does. In such circumstances the change of power is cruel but necessary. Ninety-eight minutes after Kennedy was pronounced dead, Lyndon Baines Johnson, 55, was sworn in as 36th President of the United States. And even as Air Force One winged over the sere plains of Texas and the jagged peaks of the Ozarks, bearing not only the new President but the body of the one just past, the machinery of government was still working. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.