ABSTRACT

To win congressional approval of Kennedy’s civil rights bill, MartinLuther King told aides gravely, ‘We are on a breakthrough. We need amass protest.’ The idea of a huge rally in Washington had been advanced by A. Philip Randolph in 1941, and King contacted the ‘grand old man’ of the movement, to see if all parties could work together. Randolph was glad to cooperate though his focus was different. Black unemployment, he noted, was more than twice the rate for whites, and a typical black family earned about half what an average white family did. Worse, this racial divide in income was widening. America was still one country for whites and another for blacks. Working with Bayard Rustin, the movement’s most talented organizer, Randolph suggested that a national gesture for economic reform could prod politicians to double the minimum wage and create a large federal job program. By transforming the civil rights struggle from a regional to a national campaign, the massive demonstration would be the movement’s high-water mark.