Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy

Fifty-eight years ago this week, hundreds of thousands of people participated in the 1963 March on Washington. Dozens of people from Grand Rapids also made the trek to demand racial justice, jobs and freedom. In what follows we take a look at the Grand Rapids Press coverage of the march in Detroit (in June of 1963) and the larger march on August 28th in Washington, DC. Here is a link to all of the articles from the GR Press for both marches in 1963. 

Detroit march was a testing ground for DC

There were two articles in the Grand Rapids Press (Pages 1 – 4) about the march on Detroit in June of 1963, some two months before the march on Washington. Neither of the articles on the Detroit march were on the front page and a great deal of the focus was on whether or not the march was peaceful. There was some coverage of the fact that a list of demands on civil rights were made, but only a few of those demands were mentioned in the articles.

The June 23, 1963 march on Detroit was organized primarily by Dr. King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the UAW. Both Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the UAW President Walter Reuther were featured speakers at the march.

In many ways, the Detroit march was held as sort of a test run to see if these organizations could pull off a march with hundreds of thousands of people. Detroit was chosen because the UAW had a large number of union members in the Motor City and Detroit was also one of the most critical northern cities with a major black population that was representative of police violence against blacks and other forms of structural racism.

In Preparation for the 1963 March on Washington

The first article on the 1963 march on Washington, DC, is a piece about the various groups that were organizing delegations to participate. The GR Press article (on page 5) states that the UAW, the NAACP and the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), were all sending people to participate in the historic march.

The same article in the GR Press mentions that the AFL-CIO, the Grand Rapids Urban League and the Human Relations Commission from the City of Grand Rapids, did not send their members to the historic march.

The first article on the march in August of 1963 (page 6) uses a photo of marchers with the Washington Monument in the background, with the headline that read, “Huge Rights Parade in Capital Orderly.”

The national mainstream news coverage of the march on Washington was obsessed with the idea that the only way that the march could be successful would be if it was passive and orderly. In fact, most of the major labor organizations and the Catholic Church told Dr. King and the other Civil Rights leaders that if civil disobedience would be part of the march, they would pull their support.

Another aspect of the march on Washington, DC in 1963, which is rarely discussed or even acknowledged, is that the Federal government had mobilized the military and law enforcement to make sure that people were not going to disrupt business as usual in the nation’s capital.

According to Gary Younge’s book, The Speech, the White House codenamed the March on Washington, Operation Steep Hill. Younge writes, “One thousand troops and 30 helicopters were deployed in the DC area. The Pentagon put 19,000 troops on stand by. The Eighty Second Airborne Division, based in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, stood by with C-82 boxcars loaded with guns, ammunition, and food, ready at a moment’s notice to make the 320 mile trip to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, from which soldiers would be dispatched to the Mall by helicopter to quell riots. About six thousand law enforcement officers of different kinds would be deployed that day, all armed with guns, clubs and tear gas. The one concession to civil rights sensitivities was that there would be no dogs.”

This was the context in which the march took place, in terms of what the state was willing to allow, for those that took part in the historic march. 

On page 10 of the document, the Grand Rapids Press did publish a list of the 10 demands that the marchers were bringing to the nation’s capital that day.

The very next article on page 11 & 12, shows marchers from Grand Rapids meeting with then Congressman Gerald R. Ford, with a headline reflecting how Congress was not in a hurry to listed to the demands of the marchers.

The subsequent article on page 13 provides some feedback from the Kennedy Administration on the historic march. Kennedy is quoted as saying he thinks the march help to further the “Negro cause.” What the GR Press article does not mention is that President Kennedy pleaded with the organizers of the 1963 march to stress personal responsibility. “It seems to me with all the influence that all you gentlemen have in the Negro community, that we could emphasize, which I think the Jewish community has done, on educating their children, on making them study, making them stay in school and all the rest.” Such sentiment is in direct contradiction of what the march organizers were demanding.

One final article from the Grand Rapids Press coverage of the 1963 March on Washington, was written after the marchers had returned from DC. The photo that accompanies the article shows 5 people, 4 with the NAACP and one from the UAW, looking at newspaper coverage of the march.

The article that accompanied the photo provided some basic reflection from the 5 featured in the article, about what they liked and what they were impressed by. Unfortunately, the article did not reflect any sense of urgency that the marchers had brought to DC that day, not much of a sense of the efforts put into making the march happen or the larger historical context of the 1963 march on Washington. Besides Gary Younge’s book, The Speech, another excellent resource is, Nobody Turn Me Around: A People’s History of the 1963 March on Washington, by Charles Euchner.

The Grand Rapids Press editorial and White Paternalism

In Jeanne Theoharis’s important book, A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History, she makes the point that we often look back to events like the 1963 march on Washington and think that the majority of the country supported such events.

The reality is much different. In fact, the federal government was monitoring the organizing leading up to the march and the event that day on August 28, 1963. The federal government was so concerned about what might be said, that they had it set up that they could cut the sound system when necessary, to make sure people were not calling for an uprising that day.

The major news outlets around the country reported on the march with some suspicion, specifically how the march was too polarizing and that it did not reflect what most Americans wanted. This sentiment was true, based on polls taken during the 1960s. According to Theoharis, a Gallup Poll taken in 1961, showed that only 22 percent of Americans polled supported the Freedom Rides. In 1968, another poll that was taken by Gallop, shortly after Dr. King was assassinated, showed that 73% of whites said that blacks in their community were treated the same as whites.

As an example of how the news media played a role in forming public opinion about the Black Freedom Struggle, let’s take a look an editorial from the Grand Rapids Press about the 1963 March on Washington.

Besides the Grand Rapids Press editorial on the 1963 march on Washington, we include three opinion pieces from non-Grand Rapids sources. We include these pieces, because this is what people were reading in the Grand Rapids Press in the editorial section, which also influences how people understand what took place in the summer of 1963 – which are linked here.

The Grand Rapids Press editorial uses supportive language and taken out of context might seem like those who wrote this editorial were endorsing the 1963 march on Washington. However, upon closer review, within historic context, we can see that this editorial is really framed through the lens of White Paternalism.

The Press editorial staff practices White Paternalism by using phrases like, “more orderly and better controlled.” This signals that had there been any civil resistance, the marchers would have lost all credibility in the eyes of the GR Press editorial staff. The fact is, that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and other black groups involved wanted to have civil disobedience as part of the march, but they were pressured by the Kennedy administration, the AFL-CIO and the Catholic Church not to engage in that kind of action.

The Press editorial writer then goes on to say that “this was a responsible assembly,” and then he compares it to the negative response from David Lawrence’s commentary, which the Press published alongside their editorial. (see link above).

Apparently the restraint exhibited in the marchers was also a demonstration to the world that these kinds of actions need not be violent, which would surely have been the case if this took place in Russia, at least according to the GR Press editorial.

The rest of the editorial again valorizes the fact that there was no violence expressed on the part of the marchers. Nothing is included in the editorial about what it was that those who spoke or the march organizers were demanding from the federal government. In fact, the only person identified by name in the editorial, was Congressman Gerald Ford. Black voices were not centered in this editorial, indeed they were completely absent and seemingly irrelevant.

Ironically, there was violence at the 1963 march on Washington. The violence was demonstrated on the part of the state, by rigging the microphone to cut off if what was said was not found acceptable. There was the threat of violence with the presence of over 1,000 cops ready to arrest people if they were not “orderly.” Then there was the violence of state surveillance, since we know that the communications between organizers was being monitored and their hotel rooms were being bugged by the FBI. In fact, there were an estimated 150 FBI agents there, just to monitor the crowd, according to Gary Younge’s book, The Speech.

In addition, there was the systemic violence, which is why thousands came to DC, to express their grievances. The segregation, the white supremacy and the brutality of police violence that black people experienced on a regular basis, were the grievances people brought to the nation’s capitol, as Dr. King pointed out in his speech at the march on Washington.  King also made it clear that the federal government failed to make good on its promissory note to blacks to be granted equal rights. King makes it clear that the violence of poverty, poor housing and lack of jobs for black people was the violence that the system imposed on black people every day.

As we remember the historic march on Washington in 1963, we should all be asking ourselves why the same grievances are at the forefront of the Black Freedom Struggle 58 years later?