“Did You Know?”
Myths and Facts About the 1963
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
1. Was the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom the first national
demonstration in Washington, D.C., led by civil rights organizations?
A. No, there were multiple national demonstrations by civil rights organizations in Washington, D.C.
B. No, there was a march a few years before that, but it was small and inconsequential.
C. Yes, the 1963 March on Washington was the first planned national demonstration by civil rights organizations
in Washington, D.C.
D. Yes, there were previous plans for a national demonstration by civil rights organizations but they never came
to fruition.
2. How long before the event did the six major civil rights organizations meet and
agree to organize the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom together?
A.
B.
C.
D.
A year
Six months
Two years
Two months
3. The March on Washington had a list of 10 demands. How many of those demands
were about labor issues?
A.
B.
C.
D.
One
Three
Five
Eight
4. Daisy Bates, an NAACP organizer in Little Rock, Ark., was one of two women to
speak (briefly) at the 1963 March on Washington. Although neither was on the
program, who was the other woman who spoke
A.
B.
C.
D.
Diane Nash, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
Myrlie Evers, activist and wife of Medgar Evers
Angela Davis, Black Panther and noted political prisoner
Josephine Baker, singer, dancer, and member of the French Resistance
5. The main organizer of the March on Washington, Bayard Rustin, has been
omitted from much of the Civil Rights Movement’s history for which of the
following reasons:
A.
B.
C.
D.
He was gay.
He had been a communist.
He was a war resister.
All of the above.
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6. Which black leader attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom but
neither spoke nor is well known as having attended?
A.
B.
C.
D.
W. E. B. Du Bois, intellectual and co-founder of the NAACP
Malcolm X, leader of the Nation of Islam
Langston Hughes, Harlem Renaissance poet
Ella Baker, SNCC advisor
7. Was this the first time Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech invoking the now
famous phrase “I Have a Dream?”
A.
B.
C.
D.
Yes, this was the first time he prepared a speech saying “I Have a Dream.”
No, most of Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches included him saying “I Have a Dream.”
No, Martin Luther King Jr. had used the phrase “I Have a Dream” a few times before.
Yes, the words “I Have a Dream” were an on-the-spot improvisation that Martin Luther King Jr. said for the
first time at the March on Washington.
8. How was the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) involved in the lead up to the
March on Washington?
A. They provided security for the march.
B. They collected information, spied on civil rights leaders (including Martin Luther King Jr.), and spread
misinformation.
C. They collected information on the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party to prevent any attacks against
the march.
D. Not at all.
9. Organizers of the March on Washington asked which speaker to leave out some
of the radical content from his organization’s speech?
A.
B.
C.
D.
Martin Luther King Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
Roy Wilkins, executive secretary, the NAACP
John Lewis, chairperson, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
Walter Reuther, president, UAW; chairperson, Industrial Union Department, AFL-CIO
10. The crucial element enabling progress in winning civil rights was:
A.
B.
C.
D.
Grassroots activism and organizing
National civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. or Roy Wilkins of the NAACP
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
The federal government
11. During most of the 20th century, African Americans were prevented from voting
by:
A.
B.
C.
D.
E.
Intimidation, economic retaliation, and violence
“Poll taxes” that many poor people could not afford
Legal devices like the “grandfather clause”
Literacy tests
All of the above
12. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in 1968, exactly one year to the day after he
gave a speech on:
A.
B.
C.
D.
Voting rights
School integration
Fair housing
The Vietnam War
13. In addition to African Americans, what other groups were fighting for equal
rights and/or self-determination in the 1960s and 1970s?
A.
B.
C.
D.
E.
Chicano/Mexican Americans
Native Americans
Asian Americans
Gays/lesbians
All of the above
14. Protesters came to the March on Washington to challenge racism in which
region(s) of the United States?
A.
B.
C.
D.
E.
West Coast
South
East Coast
Midwest
All of the above
15. What other Civil Rights Movement events of note occurred in 1963?
A.
B.
C.
D.
The death of WWII veteran Clyde Kennard, who was jailed for trying to attend Mississippi Southern College.
In Mississippi, 80,000 African Americans cast votes in a statewide “Freedom Ballot.”
The Children’s Crusade in Birmingham where children were arrested by the thousands and filled the jails.
All of the above.
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“Did You Know?”
Myths and Facts About the 1963
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
ANSWERS
1
Was the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom the first national
demonstration in Washington, D.C., led by civil rights organizations?
Answer: d, No, there were multiple national demonstrations by civil rights organizations in
Washington, D.C.
A. Philip Randolph founded the March on Washington Movement, a movement that was started in the early 1940s
with the aim of desegregating the arms manufacturing industry during World War II. Members of the March on
Washington Movement planned for a national demonstration in Washington, D.C. in 1941, but called it off after
President Roosevelt issued an executive order banning segregation in the arms industry. Roosevelt issued the order
after a meeting with Randolph where he became convinced that Randolph could pull off the march, which threatened
to bring 100,000 black people to Washington, DC, using civil disobedience to shut down the city.
In October of 1958, 10,000 people marched in Washington, D.C. as part of the Youth March for Integrated Schools.
Harry Belafonte, renowned performer and activist, led a group of students during the march to picket at the White
House. They intended to speak with President Eisenhower, but were denied access and instead left behind a list of
demands for the president.
The following year another national youth march was organized, this time bringing out 26,000 people. Key organizers
included Martin Luther King, Jr. Jackie Robinson, Ruth Bunche, Daisy Bates, Roy Wilkins, and Charles Zimmerman.
2
How long before the event did the six major civil rights organizations meet and
agree to organize the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom together?
Answer: d, Two months
The original plan for the March on Washington was outlined by organizer Bayard Rustin in January of 1963 and soon
adopted by the Negro American Labor Council (NALC). Throughout the spring of 1963, more organizations pledged
their support for the march, including the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
Initially, two of the largest civil rights organizations, the NAACP and the Urban League, didn’t support the March.
It wasn’t until July 2, less than two months before the date of the march, that six of the major civil rights organizations
met and agreed to organize the march together.
The fact that the march could be organized so quickly was due to multiple factors including the groundwork
established since 1941 by A. Philip Randolph; the planning begun in January of 1963 by Rustin and the Negro
American Labor Council (NALC); Rustin’s skills as an organizer; and decades of grassroots organizing all over the
country.
Fifteen hundred community based organizations—churches, unions, women’s groups, youth groups, and other civil
rights organizations—helped to organize, recruit, arrange transportation, and raise funds for the March on Washington.
At least 50,000 participants were brought by churches alone and unions brought almost as many.
The participation of roughly 250,000 people was a product of the history and collaboration of countless community
based and national organizations.
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3
The March on Washington had a list of 10 demands. How many of those
demands were about labor issues?
Answer: c, Five
Five of the March on Washington demands focused on labor issues, including a minimum wage act and a call for jobs
for the unemployed. The organizers knew that full civil and human rights for African Americans depended on access
to jobs, education, housing, and health care.
In addition to the churches, religious organizations, and civil rights organizations involved in the march, the United
Automobile Workers (UAW) and the Negro American Labor Council sponsored and helped organize the march. One
of the main organizers of the March on Washington, who was also the founder of the March on Washington
Movement, A. Philip Randolph, was a labor leader who helped found the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.
Other demands addressed education, housing, voting, public accommodations, and all constitutional rights. Some key
issues not addressed in the demands included widespread violence against African Americans; targeted brutality and
vigilantism against any people of color (and white allies) attempting to exercise their civil rights; women’s rights; and
the Vietnam War.
4
Daisy Bates, an NAACP organizer in Little Rock, Ark., was one of two women to
speak (briefly) at the 1963 March on Washington. Although neither was on the
program, who was the other woman who spoke?
Answer: d, Josephine Baker, singer, dancer, and member of the French Resistance.
While both Daisy Bates and Josephine Baker spoke, neither was listed as a speaker on the official program and neither
were allowed to speak for long. This absence of women’s voices was a stark contrast to the central role that women
played in the Civil Rights Movement, and in the preparations for the March on Washington in particular.
From left to right: Daisy Bates, Diane Nash Bevel, Rosa Parks, Gloria Richardson
As Jeanne Theoharis wrote in The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks: “As magnificent as the day was, the lack of
recognition for women’s roles was readily apparent, and Rosa Parks was increasingly disillusioned by it. No women
had been asked to speak. Pauli Murray had written A. Philip Randolph criticizing the sexism. Anna Hedgeman had
also objected. Dorothy Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women, pressed for a more substantive
inclusion of women in the program. Their criticisms were rebuffed.” Instead, as Theoharis explained, “a ‘Tribute to
Women’ would highlight six women—Rosa Parks, Gloria Richardson, Diane Nash, Myrlie Evers, Mrs. Herbert Lee,
and Daisy Bates—who would be asked to stand up and be recognized by the crowd. Daisy Bates introduced the tribute
to women, a 142-word introduction written by John Morsell that provided an awkwardly brief recognition of women’s
roles in the struggle for civil rights. . . .”
After some discussion, the march organizers agreed to let
Josephine Baker give brief opening remarks before the start
of the program. Baker was born in the United States but had
moved to France, becoming a singer and dancer of
international fame. During the German occupation of France,
Baker assisted the Free French movement as a spy and
courier for the resistance to the Nazis. During the 1950s she
was an avid supporter of the Civil Rights Movement from
abroad, and returned in 1963 to speak at the March on
Washington, wearing the French military uniform she was
awarded for her work with the French resistance.
Josephine Baker at the March on Washington,
Given the limited representation of women, historian William
1963
Jones noted in an interview with Gwen Ifill that “Some
people suggested actually picketing Randolph when he was preparing for the march. Hedgeman, Height, and other
women decided to not make an issue of it right at the march. But then, the night after the march, they actually called a
meeting at the national headquarters of the National Council of Negro Women, which was the organization that
Dorothy Height headed. And at that meeting, they actually planned a series of meetings that, as I explain in the book
[The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights], actually culminated in the
formation of the National Organization of Women. And it really became a catalyzing moment in the rebirth of a
feminist movement in the United States.”
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5
The main organizer of the March on Washington, Bayard Rustin, has been
omitted from much of the Civil Rights Movement’s history for which of the
following reasons:
Answer: d, All of the above.
Bayard Rustin was a lifelong activist and political organizer. When Bayard was a child, his family was politically
active in the NAACP and organized against Jim Crow. When Rustin went to college in New York City in the 1930s,
he joined the Youth Communist League and organized with the campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys. Rustin later
joined the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and the pacifist organization the Fellowship of Reconciliation
(FOR).
Bayard Rustin at blackboard.
During World War II Rustin, a pacifist, refused induction into the military. As Larry Brimner explains in We Are One:
[Bayard Rustin] informed the draft board that he could not report for either military duty or public
service and explained that his reason for refusing all stemmed “from the basic spiritual truth that
men are brothers in the sight of God.” What followed was federal prison in Ashland, Kentucky,
where authorities regretted every minute of Bayard’s presence. No sooner had he arrived in prison
to serve his three-year sentence than Bayard began staging protests. He protested segregation in the
prison system. He protested prisoners’ living conditions. And he continued to study Gandhi. Prison
officials begged for his transfer.
Rustin was also a gay man and when his sexual orientation was revealed, he was fired from his position at FOR. Rustin
then began working with the War Resisters League and went on to help organize the Montgomery bus boycott and the
March on Washington with Martin Luther King, Jr.
For nearly six decades Rustin organized and protested against injustice. But despite his amazing work in the Civil
Rights Movement, he is often erased from history because he had been a communist, a war resister, and because he
was gay.
In the past year Rustin has finally begun to receive some of the long overdue recognition he deserves, including the
Medal of Freedom, posthumously awarded by President Obama in 2013.
6
Which black leader attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
but neither spoke nor is well known as having attended?
Answer: b, Malcolm X.
Malcolm X was the charismatic leader of the Nation of
Islam (NOI) who advocated Black self-determination. Elijah
Muhammad, the head of the NOI, forbade members of the
NOI from attending the March of Washington and Malcolm
X called it the “farce on Washington.” Despite Elijah
Muhammad’s orders, Malcolm X attended the March on
Washington, speaking to the press about his opposition to
the March, while speaking in private with a number of civil
rights leaders.
As to the other people mentioned as possible answers:
W.E.B. DuBois, the African American intellectual leader
and founder of the NAACP, died the night before the March
on Washington in Ghana. As Charles Euchner explains in
Nobody Turn Me Around: A People’s History of the 1963
March on Washington:
Western Union had delivered hundreds of telegrams of congratulations to the March on
Washington tent. One came from W. E. B. Du Bois.
”One thing alone I charge you, as you live, believe in Life!” Du Bois said in a final message
composed two months before, during his final illness. “Always human beings will live and
progress to greater, broader and fuller life. The only possible death is to lose belief in this truth
simply because the Great End comes slowly, because time is long.”
Then came the news that Du Bois had died the day before in Accra, Ghana, at the age of ninetyfive. Maya Angelou led a group of Americans and Ghanaians to the U.S. embassy in Accra,
carrying torches and placards reading “Down with American Apartheid” and “America, a White
Man’s Heaven and a Black Man’s Hell.”
In Washington, the news fluttered through the audience and onto the platform. Continue reading
here to learn about the debate at the 1963 March on Washington as to who should announce the
death of DuBois.
Ella Baker was not present. If you have not heard of her before, please pause to read this
short bio. Why? Because Baker was, as described in her biography by Barbara Ransby,
“one of the most important African American leaders of the twentieth century and
perhaps the most influential woman in the civil rights movement. Baker was a gifted
grassroots organizer whose remarkable career spanned fifty years and touched
thousands of lives. She was a key figure in the NAACP, a founder of the SCLC, and a
prime mover in the creation of SNCC.”
Langston Hughes–poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist–was in
Europe at the time of the 1963 March on Washington.
Ella Baker, 1968.
AP photo.
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7
Was this the first time Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech invoking the now
famous phrase “I Have a Dream?”
Answer: c, No, Martin Luther King Jr. used that phrase before, including in a speech in
Detroit two months earlier declaring, “I Have a Dream.”
On June 23, 1963, roughly two months before the March on Washington, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the Walk to
Freedom in Detroit, Michigan. The Walk to Freedom was the largest civil rights demonstration to date with 125,000
people marching for an end to police brutality and segregation in the South and for access to housing, education, and
better wages in the North.
Martin Luther King Jr. said:
“I have a dream this afternoon that one day right here in Detroit, Negroes will be able to buy a house or rent a house
anywhere that their money will carry them and they will be able to get a job. Yes, I have a dream this afternoon that
one day in this land the words of Amos will become real and ‘justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like
a mighty stream.’”
8
How was the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) involved in the lead up to the
March on Washington?
Answer: b, They collected information, spied on civil rights leaders (including Martin Luther
King, Jr.), and spread misinformation.
The FBI, under J. Edgar Hoover, had a long history of
investigating organized efforts by African Americans,
including the earlier March on Washington Movement.
As described the NPR interview with Tim Weiner (author
of Enemies: A History of the FBI):
“Hoover saw the civil rights movement from the 1950s
onward and the anti-war movement from the 1960s
onward, as presenting the greatest threats to the stability of
the American government since the Civil War,” he says.
“These people were enemies of the state, and in particular
Martin Luther King [Jr.] was an enemy of the state. And
Hoover aimed to watch over them. If they twitched in the
wrong direction, the hammer would come down.”
In the fall of 1963, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy
approved wiretaps on all of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s
telephones. The FBI even wrote threatening letters to King
with the aim of coercing King to step down from his
position as the head of the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC).
James W. Loewen notes in Lies My Teacher Told Me: “In
August 1963 Hoover initiated a campaign to destroy Martin
Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement. With the
approval of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, he tapped the telephones of King’s associates, bugged King’s hotel
rooms, and made tape recordings of King’s conversations with and about women. The FBI then passed on the lurid
details, including photographs, transcripts, and tapes, to Sen. Strom Thurmond and other white supremacists, reporters,
labor leaders, foundation administrators, and, of course, the president…King wasn’t the only target: Hoover also
passed on disinformation about the Mississippi Summer Project; other civil rights organizations such as CORE and
SNCC; and other civil rights leaders, including Jesse Jackson.”
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9
Organizers of the March on Washington asked which speaker to leave out some
of the radical content from his organization’s speech?
Answer: c, John Lewis, Chairperson, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
John Lewis was the chairperson of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a youth civil rights
organization that fought on the frontlines to dismantle Jim Crow in the U.S. Many members of SNCC helped write the
speech Lewis planned to give.
Some of the organizers of the March on Washington were uncomfortable with some of what they considered the
radical content of the SNCC speech and asked Lewis to change it. The original speech included reference to the “black
masses,” “revolution,” and called the Kennedy administration’s Civil Rights bill “too little, too late.”
Lewis and other SNCC staff agreed to make changes in the speech, mainly because of their respect for Mr. Randolph,
who expressed his strong desire that the march not fall apart because of internal discord.
10 The crucial element enabling progress in winning civil rights was:
Answer: a, Grassroots activism and organizing.
LEFT: Doug Smith and Sandy Leigh participate in voter registration canvassing, 1964. Photo (c) Herbert Randall.
McCain Library and Archives, USM. MIDDLE: Doug Smith and Sandy Leigh participate in voter registration
canvassing, 1964. Photo (c) Herbert Randall. McCain Library and Archives, USM. RIGHT: Gloria Richardson facing off
the National Guard, Cambridge, Maryland, May 1964. Photo by Fred Ward
Inspiring leaders, large mass demonstrations, and eventually federal civil rights legislation and enforcement all
contributed to changes toward greater equality, but grassroots organizers laid the essential foundation of the
movement. Largely unacknowledged in textbooks, they performed the unglamorous, painstaking, and often dangerous
work of building trust, commitment, and collective action toward local victories.
The publisher of I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, by Charles Payne, explains:
The leaders were ordinary women and men–
sharecroppers, domestics, high school students,
beauticians, independent farmers–committed to organizing
the civil rights struggle house by house, block by block,
relationship by relationship.
The young organizers who were the engines of change in
the state were not following any charismatic national
leader. Far from being a complete break with the past,
their work was based directly on the work of an older
generation of activists, people like Ella Baker, Septima
Clark, Amzie Moore, Medgar Evers, Aaron Henry. These
leaders set the standards of courage against which young
organizers judged themselves; they served as models of
activism that balanced humanism with militance.
While historians have commonly portrayed the movement
leadership as male, ministerial, and well-educated, Payne
finds that organizers in Mississippi and elsewhere in the
most dangerous parts of the South looked for leadership
to working-class rural Blacks, and especially to women.
Payne also finds that Black churches, typically portrayed
as front runners in the civil rights struggle, were in fact
late supporters of the movement.
CORE pickets Penny’s Department
Store in Berkeley, Calif.,
December, 1963.
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11 During most of the 20th century, African Americans were prevented from voting
by:
Answer: e, All of the above.
LEFT: A. Philip Randolph at the Freedom School Convention in Meridian, Miss. RIGHT: Mississippi Freedom
Democratic Party, Lauderdale County Meeting at First Union Baptist Church, Meridian. Both photos by Mark Levy.
After the Civil War, many African Americans took grave risks to exercise the right to vote, encountering relentless and
multifaceted white resistance. While there were important pockets of black voting strength in the South (primarily in
urban areas) during Reconstruction, it was not until the mid-1960s that the Civil Rights Movement was able to
decisively turn the tide against black disenfranchisement.
One of the best ways to learn about the grassroots work of the Civil Rights Movement is to read the accounts of voter
registration campaigns, including the role of Freedom Schools. Here one can learn about the strength and
determination of the people who risked their lives to exercise their legal right to vote.
12 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in 1968, exactly one year to the day after he
gave a speech on:
Answer: d, The Vietnam War
On April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a speech in New York
City on the occasion of his becoming co-chairperson of Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam (subsequently
renamed Clergy and Laity Concerned).
Titled “Beyond Vietnam,” it was his first major speech on the war in Vietnam—what the Vietnamese aptly call the
American War. King linked the escalating U.S. commitment to that war with its abandonment of the commitment to
social justice at home. His call for a “shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society” and for us to
“struggle for a new world” has acquired even greater urgency than when he issued it decades ago.
The speech concludes:
Our only hope today lies in our ability
to recapture the revolutionary spirit
and go out into a sometimes hostile
world declaring eternal hostility to
poverty, racism, and militarism. With
this powerful commitment we shall
boldly challenge the status quo and
unjust mores and thereby speed the
day when “every valley shall be
exalted, and every mountain and hill
shall be made low, and the crooked
shall be made straight and the rough
places plain …” Now let us begin.
Now let us rededicate ourselves to the
long and bitter—but beautiful—
struggle for a new world.
April 4, 1967. Dr. King at Riverside Church in NYC.
Photo by John C. Goodwin.
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13 In addition to African Americans, what other groups were fighting for equal
rights and/or self-determination in the 1960s and 1970s?
Answer: e, All of the above.
Muhammad Ali, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Floyd Red Crow Westerman, Harold Smith, Stevie Wonder,
Marlon Brando, Max Gail, Dick Gregory, Richie Havens and David Amram at the concert at the end
of the Longest Walk, a 3,600-mile protest march from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., in 1978
in the name of the Native rights. Photo: David Amram.
Too often history is taught as segmented, isolated incidents in time. Traditionally, the Civil Rights Movement is
viewed solely as a struggle for black Americans, by black Americans. Actually, the Civil Rights Movement was a
struggle for full democracy for everyone in the U.S. Vincent Harding noted in “Black History IS America’s History”
(1990), that:
One of the major challenges available to teachers in every possible institution is to introduce
ourselves and our students to an alternative vision of the movement, to see it as a great gift for all
Americans, as a central point of grounding for our own pro-democracy movement.
The modern Civil Rights Movement also inspired oppressed people nationally and internationally. As Bernice Johnson
Reagon explains:
Few movements have created as many ripples [as the Civil Rights Movement], and certainly not
ripples that crossed racial and class and social lines as happened in the 1960′s.
The Civil Rights Movement, being Black at the bottom, offered up the possibility of a thorough
analysis of society…. The exciting thing about the Civil Rights Movement is the extent to which it
gave participants a glaring analysis of who and where they were in society… People who were
Spanish-speaking in the Civil Rights Movement, who had been white, when they got back, turned
Brown. Some of the leaders of the antiwar movement were politicized by their work in the Civil
Rights Movement…. The Civil Rights Movement was only a dispersion. Its dispersion continues to
be manifested in ever-widening circles of evaluation of civil and human rights afforded by this
society.
…You cannot present an accurate picture of the movements of the 1960′s and 1970′s unless you
show them resting on the foundation of the Civil Rights Movement. A study that’s done from some
other point of view will be a myopic report on those other movements. I find, generally, that people
who participated in those other movements, especially if those other movements were
predominately white, see whatever they participated in as central… It is, again, a a distortion of
what Black people do to stimulate the salvation of this country… My point is the Civil Rights
Movement [bore] not just the Black Power Movement and Black revolutionary movements, but
every progressive struggle that has occurred in this country since that time.” [In an interview with
Dick Cluster called "The Borning Struggle: The Civil Rights Movement," South End Press,
reprinted in Putting the Movement Back into Civil Rights Teaching.]
14 Protesters came to the March on Washington to challenge racism in which
region(s) of the United States?
Answer: e, All of the above.
As Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham explains in the preface to Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the
South, 1940-1980:
The civil rights movement occupies a prominent place in popular thinking and scholarly work on post-1945 U.S.
history. Yet the dominant narrative of the movement remains that of a nonviolent movement born in the South during
the 1950s that emerged triumphant in the early 1960s, only to be derailed by the twin forces of Black Power and white
backlash when it sought to move outside the South after 1965.
African American protest and political movements outside the South appear as ancillary and subsequent to the “real”
movement in the South, despite the fact that black activism existed in the North, Midwest, and West in the 1940s, and
persisted well into the 1970s. [In fact, there were] distinctive forms of U.S. racism according to place and a variety of
tactics and ideologies that community members used to attack these inequalities. [T]he civil rights movement was
indeed a national movement for racial justice and liberation.
15 What other Civil Rights Movement events of note occurred in 1963?
Answer: d, All of the above.
Textbook mentions of the modern Civil Rights Movement highlight 1963 as the year of
the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream”
speech. Occasionally, they will also reference the Children’s Crusade and the bombing
of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., or the murder of Medgar Evers
in Jackson, Miss., as isolated acts of resistance and racism.
Yet, it was a pivotal year as direct action, voter registration, and important strategic
shifts occurred nationwide after several years of active and public struggle. Writer
James Baldwin referred to the events, 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, as
the “latest slave rebellion.”
A deeper understanding of these events and their interconnectedness (domestically and internationally) helps students
“read” history and their contemporary world with a keener eye toward coordinated action.
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