History books record August 28, 1963, as the day when over a quarter-million people rallied in Washington, in the first-ever nationally televised demonstration—when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his iconic "I Have a Dream" oration.
But as Charles Euchner reveals in his landmark work Nobody Turn Me Around, the march's significance is more surprising and complex than standard treatments allow.
The March on Washington took place at the end of the busiest year in the history of the civil rights movement. After Project C, Dr. King's assault on segregation in Birmingham, more than 2,000 demonstrations rocked cities and towns across the nation.
The movement spread from the South to northern cities like New York, Newark, Philadelphia, Chicago, and St. Louis. After months of caution and delay, President John F. Kennedy proposed, on June 11, the most ambitious civil rights legislation since Reconstruction.
As a quarter-million people got ready to gather in the nation's capital to present a "living petition" to the nation, the movement threatened to splinter. Dr. King's commitment to nonviolence and integration was coming under attack from both the right and left. Quietly, segregationists like George Wallace and Ross Barnett were pushing constitutional amendments that would neuter efforts to achieve racial equality.
Euchner creates fresh portraits of the two organizers of the march -- A. Philip Randolph, the leading black labor organizer whose plans for a march in 1941 forced President Franklin D. Roosevelt to issue an executive order banning discrimination in war industries, a Bayard Rustin, the leading apostle of nonviolence who tutored a young M.L. King during the Montgomery bus boycott. Using interviews with former friends and associates -- as well as never-before-heard interviews -- Euchner also provides a fresh portrait of King.
Euchner also provides a rich tapestry of the ordinary people who traveled from all over the country to demand their basic rights. He shows three teenagers from Alabama hitchhiking to Washington . . . a boy who had been jailed in Mississippi's notorious Parchman prison, most of it naked . . . a bus from San Francisco making the longest journey . . . a young activist who's blunt words to Attorney General Robert Kennedy jarred the administration . . . a minister from upstate New York who was incarcerated during as part of the internment of japanese-Americans during World War II . . . and more.
Euchner also shows Hollywood stars eager to use their status to promote the cause . . . the incomparable Mahalia jackson, selected by Dr. King to sing before his speech . . . Lena Horne, struggling to develop her own racial identity, touching a young girl with her gutteral cry of "Freedom."
With rich oral histories from over one hundred participants—high-profile civil rights leaders but also ordinary Americans, like the marcher who won a train ticket after enduring a brutal jailing—Euchner offers a vivid tale of that day.
Nobody Turn Me Around shows the movement at its apex, on the verge of achieving historic reform-and decline. The book shows James Farmer watching the march from his jail cell; Malcolm X's secret vow to help the march, while mocking it from the sidelines; how King really wrote his landmark address; the controversy over John Lewis's damning speech; and devastating undercurrents involving JFK and J. Edgar Hoover. Each scene comes alive in this richly intimate account of the peak of the civil rights era.
