Unleashed Memoir #1: "Don't Shoot, I'm an American Reporter"… March on Washington 1963
The first of many parts of my memoir-in-gestation. This time, a trip back in history to a very distant, very relevant moment from the past.
August 28 is an historic day in the American experiment. And this year marks the 60th anniversary of the event that will forever mark this moment as a landmark in the struggle for civil rights for an enormous swath of the American people—the March on Washington of 1963. As it happens, I was there, standing just in the shadow of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr as he delivered his 'dream.’
To commemorate this moment, you will find here an excerpt from my memoir, "Don't Shoot, I'm an American Reporter," which is still being written. From time to time, Unleashed Memoir will present excerpts from this work where and when they resonate especially.
Do not hesitate to react, incidentally. And stay tuned!
By mid-summer of 1963, I was preparing for one of the great adventures of my young life. I decided that I would attend and cover the March on Washington. Since the Harvard College radio station, WHRB where I served as news director, was effectively off the air for the summer months, my plan was to prepare a documentary for our return to regular broadcasting in September.
At this distant remove, it’s often difficult to recall the euphoria of those early months of unending hope and boundless expectations. When John Kennedy was elected President, when Camelot arrived in Washington, I was just a junior in high school, quite insulated from the events of the larger world.
By the time of Kennedy’s earliest tests as President—the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Bay of Pigs—I was still going to sleep each night in the cocoon of my gabled bedroom on Philbrick Road in Newton Centre, Massachusetts. Still, by the time I’d arrived on a broader stage, at Harvard and the Harvard Radio Broadcasting (WHRB) network,” the early dreams of Camelot had still not faded. We appreciated each day how privileged we were to be at the source, the origin, of so much that was underway in the nation’s capital with the bright and shining star of our impossibly young and astonishingly brilliant President who had lured so many of the best and brightest to his side from Cambridge. So, when the opportunity presented itself for me to be at least a spectator on the fringes of Camelot, I seize it with a passion all but unprecedented in my young and hitherto so sheltered life.
The 1963 March on Washington was one of the seminal events of the civil rights movement. The movement had already lured many Harvard students to the South where they hit the pavements for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Its origins dated to 1957 when efforts to desegregate the bus system of Montgomery, Alabama, attracted a host of black ministers and activists including Bayard Rustin from New York, Reverend Ralph Abernathy of Montgomery and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
But the origins of the March on Washington really dated back to 1941 when A. Philip Randolph, president of both the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the Negro American Labor Council and vice president of the AFL-CIO, had organized an earlier such march that persuaded President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to establish the Fair Employment Practices Committee, effectively ending hiring discrimination in America’s defense industries at the height of World War II.
The 1963 march had an even broader agenda. Timed to mark the hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Abraham Lincoln, the organizers of this march hoped to bring an end to discrimination, but particularly legislated segregation, across the United States, especially in the South where such practices had been the law of the land since the end of the Civil War. The march came together quite quickly—as did my plans to cover it.
On July 2, Dr. King, who headed the SCLC, Randolph and Rustin met with James L. Farmer Jr. of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), John Lewis of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, and Whitney Young of the Urban League to plan a march that would bring together protesters from across the nation. In deference to his long leadership of the civil rights movement and his role in such lobbying efforts, Randolph became the titular head of the March on Washington. But logistics were placed in the hands of Bayard Rustin, who for years had been organizing “Freedom Rides” to desegregate transportation systems in the South. The organizers announced plans to bring more than 100,000 people to Washington in the heat of the summer. The prospects for such an all but unprecedented gathering sent chills through media and government alike with visions of uncontrolled mobs coursing through the capital’s streets, venting their spleen, whipped up by frenzied speeches. The reality, of course, was far different. That still didn’t prevent my parents from worrying. But I was determined.
So, several days in advance of the march events, I grabbed my Botar [battery-operated tape recorder] and headed for Boston’s South Station and the train to Washington. My goal was to tape as many interviews as possible before the march began, then head to the Mall—the vast green parkland that stretched down from the Lincoln Memorial past the Reflecting Pool to the Washington Monument and get as close as I possibly could to the platform where I might take it all in.
The day before the march itself, I made my way to the Capitol. It was a lot easier to gain entrance in those days—before assassinations and terrorist bombings turned the halls of Congress into an armed camp. My first interview was with the venerable Speaker of the House of Representatives, John W. McCormack.
McCormack came to the House in 1928, at the age of thirty-seven, as a freshman congressman from Massachusetts, taking over the seat left vacant by the death of the old-time Irish politician, James A. Galvin. In those days, in Boston, the only way for an Irish Democrat to lose a seat, basically, was to die in office. McCormick had been a Suffolk County trial attorney—just like my dad, who apparently knew him, at least in passing, and had followed his rise through the State House and on to Congress. Taken under the wing of Speaker John Nance Garner, he quickly got himself appointed to the influential Ways and Means Committee and began building a following of his own. A fervent New Deal liberal, he also attached himself to the powerful Sam Rayburn who, when he became Speaker, named McCormick House Majority Leader. For the next twenty-one years, Rayburn and McCormick ruled the House with iron fists. A firm believer in bipartisanship, he often enforced this concept by simply shouting across the House floor that Dwight D. Eisenhower would never have gotten a single measure passed without his support.
In 1962, with fellow Massachusetts Democrat John F. Kennedy in the White House, McCormick became the fifty-third Speaker of the House. McCormick, along with his Senate counterpart Lyndon Johnson, a veteran Texas Democrat and now Vice President of the United States, were firm believers in civil rights. Such a view was no doubt only buttressed by the discrimination early Irish immigrants felt at the hands of the reigning Boston Brahmins who maintained their own early grip on Massachusetts politics until they were overwhelmed by newly-arriving Catholics and their tightly controlled electoral machine. So, it was natural, if I were to get some sense of what impact this March on Washington might have on its targets—Congress, which would legislate a more liberalized civil rights regime and the executive who would enforce these laws—I should pay a visit on McCormick. Dad made it happen. A few choicely placed phone calls, and I wound up on the Speaker’s schedule.
In mid-morning, I was ushered into his office. I had never before seen an office of quite such palatial dimensions. It seemed it was as large as a football field, though in fact it was only 180 square feet. Still, McCormick had strategically placed his massive mahogany desk at the very end, so it was necessary to walk the entire length of the room to wind up in front of it. I sat down and put my Botar on the edge of his desk. Without another word, he snapped, “Well, are you going to turn on that thing?” I smiled wanly and did so. We then began a brief conversation, to which he warmed as we continued. Yes, he was watching the March with great interest. He was concerned that it come off safely and calmly, especially if its leaders were to get what they had come for—an understanding in Congress that a national civil rights law was necessary and proper. Before I knew it, I was headed back out the door. McCormick continued as Speaker until the session of Congress that began January 3, 1971, shepherded through Lyndon Johnson’s masterful Civil Rights Act and a host of other important measures giving minorities in the United States the rights that they deserved and that they had won, as it turned out, starting with the March on Washington I was about to cover.
My next stop that morning was the Senate Radio Press Gallery. I’d been promised a very brief interview with Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield. It must have been very brief because I remember none of it, though I do know that it found its way into my broadcast.
But while I was hanging around the Gallery, in strolled Senator Strom Thurmond, who died at the age of 100 in 2003, but in 1963 was in the prime of his life. He was 60 years old, and it would be eight more years before he fathered what was then believed to be his first child, by his second wife who was 44 years his junior. Thurmond was especially interesting to me because he was a Democrat representing the determinedly southern state of South Carolina, and quite vocal about it. So, I approached him with my Botar.
He looked down at me from what seemed a towering height. “Where ya from, boy?” he smiled. I said that I was representing the Harvard radio station. “A Harvard boy, eh?” he boomed, raring back to look more closely at me. “Tell you what,” he continued. “You pump iron?” I demurred. “Well, I’ll challenge you. If you can lift more weights than I can, then I’ll give you your interview.” I calculated quickly. It seemed pretty unlikely that a scrawny (I never passed 115 pounds spread across 5 feet 8 inches while I was in college), could outlift a rather large adult. Still, he was more than three times my age, so I calculated, even if I couldn’t out-lift him, perhaps I could still hornswoggle him out of an interview. And that’s just what happened.
We retired to his office where there was laid out an entire set of weights. He picked up a rather daunting size and promptly swung it, rather effortlessly, over his head. I tried the same dumbbell and it felt like it was nailed to the floor. Couldn’t budge it. Others told me years later he was quite proud of his weightlifting ability and used it frequently to his advantage. This time, though, he clearly did want to tell a Harvard boy what he thought of this march (not much) and its leadership, and all in quite vitriolic terms. A few weeks earlier, on the floor of the Senate, he had flailed Bayard Rustin as a “Communist, draft-dodger, and homosexual,” and had his entire California arrest file entered in the Congressional record. He even brandished a photograph from FBI files that showed Rustin talking with Dr. King while the SCLC leader was sunbathing, implying some sordid relationship between the two. By the time of our conversation, Thurmond had either calmed down a bit, or felt it prudent to temper his language, because he was somewhat more circumspect in his denunciations of the march to a journalist who he no doubt saw hailing from the heart of the Kennedy liberal establishment.
Through the night beginning August 27 and into the early morning hours the next day, more than 2,000 buses, 21 special trains, 10 chartered airliners, and uncounted cars converged on Washington.
All regularly scheduled planes, trains, and buses were also filled to capacity. The organizers chose a strategic moment. Congress would be in session—Congressmen would be able to experience, first-hand the power and the emotions of the assembled multitude. Indeed, some 450 members of Congress were among the more than 200,000 who converged on the Lincoln Memorial, filling the grounds to capacity, spilling down the Mall on both sides of the Reflecting Pool, darkening the slopes up to the base of the Washington Monument.
E.W. (Ned) Kenworthy reported from Washington on the March in the lede story of The New York Times, beneath a three-line banner headline:
More than 200,000 Americans, most of them black but many of them white, demonstrated here today for a full and speedy program of civil rights and equal job opportunities.
It was the greatest assembly for a redress of grievances that this capital has ever seen.
One hundred years and 240 days after Abraham Lincoln enjoined the emancipated slaves to “abstain from all violence” and “labor faithfully for reasonable wages” this vast throng proclaimed in march and song and through the speeches of their leaders that they were still waiting for the freedom and the jobs.
There was no violence to mar the demonstration. In fact, at times there was an air of hootenanny about it as groups of schoolchildren clapped hands and swung into the familiar freedom songs.
But if the crowd was good-natured, the underlying tone was one of dead seriousness. The emphasis was on “freedom” and “now.” At the same time the leaders emphasized, paradoxically but realistically, that the struggle was just beginning.
You’ll never find me in the myriad photos of the multitude that began spreading out before the Lincoln Memorial shortly after 7 am on what became a slightly cloudy day, temperature hovering at 82 degrees by early afternoon in the nation’s capital—very much a humid, southern city, especially in late August. I was never able to persuade the parade organizers to award me the coveted press credentials that would have won me a spot inside the press tent and access to the official “audio feed” to tape the proceedings. But I was nothing if not resourceful. Instead, I managed to push toward the front of the crowd and parked myself next to a loudspeaker in an area just below the towering speakers’ platform that had been built onto the front of the Lincoln Memorial. From there, I could hold up the Botar’s little plastic microphone. It was a warm day, the Botar was not exactly the sort of tiny device every reporter is equipped with today, closer to the size and weight of the first volume of Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. My wrist, then my arm began to ache, but I couldn’t move or risk losing the purchase I had on the loudspeaker that was in front of me, and the clear view I had of the history that was beginning to unfold before me. I dared not risk this one chance to capture it all. I did. And there was quite a lot.
Joan Baez, launched the official proceedings with her signature ballad, We Shall Overcome:
“Oh deep in my heart, I do believe. We shall overcome some day.”
When I met and interviewed Joan Baez for CBS News in Paris 20 years later on the eve of another landmark concert at the Place de la Concorde, she remembered August 28, 1963 as though it was yesterday.
Peter, Paul and Mary followed, asking, “How many times must a man look up before he can see the sky.”
Then, Odetta belted out her call to action: “If they ask you who you are, tell them you’re a child of God.” The crowd was just warming up, swaying all around me to these masters of the art of building and conveying a mood like few who have ever lived, before or since. But, again, it was just a prelude to the main event—what nearly a quarter of a million people had come, sometimes thousands, often hundreds of miles to bear witness to.
There followed what seemed like an interminable parade of leaders of social, political, trade union and civil rights organizations: Walter P. Reuter, head of the United Auto Workers; A. Philip Randolph; the Rev. Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, vice chairman of the Commission on Religion and Race of the National Council of Churches; Mathew Ahmann, executive director of the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice; Rabbi Joachim Prinz, president of the American Jewish Congress; Whitney M. Young Jr., executive director of the National Urban League. Only one of the march’s organizers, James Farmer, president of the Congress of Racial Equality, was unable to speak in person. He was jailed in Louisiana, arrested at a civil rights rally. CORE’s national chairman Floyd B. McKissick, read his stem-winding speech. Most made it quite plain that the Kennedy civil rights bill, then stuttering its way through Congressional committees, did not go far enough—even such a milquetoast version was facing major hurdles. Only the commitment and persuasion of that consummate Congressional manipulator, Lyndon Baines Johnson, was able to secure its passage in 1964—his first pledge following the assassination of President Kennedy.
And then we came to that rendezvous with history—that moment reserved for the individual that The Times’s Kenworthy described as the one “who had suffered perhaps most of all—who ignited the crowd with words that might have been written by the sad, brooding man enshrined within. My tape recorder picked up every word of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King.
But I leave it to Kenworthy to note where the crowd’s punctuation cut in:
As he rose, a great roar welled up from the crowd. When he started to speak, a hush fell.
“Even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream,” he said.
“It is a dream chiefly rooted in the American dream,” he went on.
“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’
“I have a dream…” The vast throng listening intently to him roared.
“…that one day in the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood.
“I have a dream…” The crowd roared.
“…that one day even the State of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
“I have a dream…” The crowd roared.
“…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.
“I have a dream…” The crowd roared.
“…that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”
As Dr. King concluded with a quotation from a Negro hymn—“Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty”—the crowd recognizing that he was finishing, roared once again and waved their signs and pennants.
Kenworthy failed to add Dr. King’s final “Free at last,” that my tape did pick up. But The Times clearly recognized, by reproducing virtually his entire text in this story, as did we who were listening, that we had just experienced an immensely moving evolutionary point in history and we turned and hugged those next to us, complete strangers. Gone was the pain in my right shoulder from holding up the microphone, the sweat streaming down my face in the muggy Potomac summer heat, the misery of my shirt sticking to my body.
Others who followed Dr. King were but anti-climaxes, even the harsh, all but vitriolic message from John Lewis, chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee [SNCC], or “Snick”, who warned:
“If we do not get meaningful legislation out of this Congress, the time will come when we will not confine our marching to Washington. We will march through the South, through the streets of Jackson, through the streets of Danville, through the streets of Cambridge [Mississippi], through the streets of Birmingham.
“But we will march with the spirit of love and the spirit of dignity that we have shown here today.”
There was, apparently, considerable disagreement up to the very last minute among the various march organizers as to just how razor-sharp their rhetoric could or should be—especially with their goal of winning a profound victory in Congress that could be translated to the streets of the Deep South. So, according to several chroniclers, Lewis toned down the speech he had planned to give and that had been distributed to the press the evening before, saying:
“We will not wait for the President, the Justice Department, nor the Congress, but we will take matters into our own hands and create a source of power, outside of any national structure, that could and would assure us a victory….We will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did.”
Lewis removed these final words, according to Kenworthy, after the Most Rev. Patrick J. O’Boyle, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Washington “refused to give the invocation if the offending words were spoken by Mr. Lewis.” Indeed, it’s easy to forget today, nearly a half century later, that the political needs of President Kennedy, the nation’s first Catholic president, were very much on the minds of the nation’s Catholic leadership.
By late afternoon it was over. As Kenworthy wrote:
The human tide that swept over the Mall between the shrines of Washington and Lincoln fell back faster than it came in. As soon as the ceremony broke up this afternoon, the exodus began. With astounding speed the last buses and trains cleared the city by mid-evening.
At 9 P.M. [when the presses began to roll for the first edition of The Times] the city was as calm as the water of the Reflecting Pool between the two memorials.
The next day, I headed back to Cambridge. The Fall semester of my junior year would begin in just two weeks—I had that much time to assemble my documentary. And I did. The next February 29, the Crimson published this brief story:
The UPI Broadcasters Association presented WHRB with the Tom Phillips Award for the best documentary of 1963 Thursday night. WHRB won the annual New England competition with its program on "The March on Washington."
The one-hour program, which was first broadcast last September, included exclusive interviews with Speaker of the House John W. McCormack (D-Mass.), Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.), and Sen. J. Strom Thurmond D-S.C.).
The brass award plaque, mounted on dark wood, hung in the WHRB newsroom for some decades after that evening.
It was joined several years later by another, awarded to one of my successors as News Director, Chris Wallace, son of my eventual CBS News colleague, Mike Wallace. To my knowledge, they were the only two such awards ever won by WHRB News.
While so many of my classmates became deeply embroiled in political issues and causes, I retreated ever more resolutely into dispassionate observation that to me, personally, was so much more appealing, personally and professionally.
So, the civil rights movement became a subject I followed for years with considerable interest, but none of the direct involvement that engaged my classmates. A number of them headed south to participate directly in the movement. Robert Ellis Smith, who later became a close and lifelong friend, and who was president of the Crimson in 1962, became the editor of The Southern Courier, a newspaper published in Birmingham, Alabama by Crimson alums to chronicle the civil rights movement of the 1960s in ways the southern press was incapable of or certainly disinclined to do.
As Bob put it more than forty years later:
I went South to work on the Southern Courier as an act of patriotism. Not to “save black people,” but to “save my country.” I was outraged that there were parts of the country that I couldn’t travel safely in, that others could not travel freely in. I was outraged that in parts of the U.S., persons were denied the right to vote, to get a decent job, to stay in travel accommodations or eat in a restaurant of their choice.
Little of this, however, was top of mind that Fall of 1963 as I plunged full tilt into my new major of History. I had just two years to fulfill all my Harvard concentration requirements, produce an honors thesis, and graduate, while somehow holding down what was effectively a full-time (though unpaid) job as WHRB’s news director.
I cannot tell you how much this means to me, dear Audrey … yes, there will certainly be many more episodes to come !!!
A fascinated story. Brilliantly written.learned alot especially because I was in Moscow when all this happened. Can't wait for the rest of your memoirs.