On Sunday's episode of The Excerpt podcast: Celebrating the outsized impact of Dr. Martin Luther King

On August 28, 1963, an estimated 250,000 people took part in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. After the march, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial where he delivered his iconic "I Have a Dream" speech calling for an end to racial discrimination. It was a watershed moment for civil rights in America. USA TODAY spoke with witnesses of that historic day who vividly recall what it was like to be there.

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Dana Taylor:

Welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor and today is Sunday, January 14th, 2024. In honor of Martin Luther King Day tomorrow we want to share an episode that we think captures the essence of why we honor King each year. It's about his outsized impact on the Civil Rights Movement, a grassroots campaign, which in many ways culminated with the march on Washington in 1963 where King gave his famous I Have a Dream Speech. This episode originally aired on August 23rd, 2023. Hello, I'm Dana Taylor for USA Today with a special edition of 5 Things. This month marks the 60th anniversary of the march on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It was a watershed event in the struggle for civil rights in America. The day-long gathering culminated in one of the most monumental speeches in American history.

Dr. Clarence Jones:

Understand the march on Washington, you have to understand the year 1963, the seminal event in the year in 1963, of course, the Civil Rights Movement was Birmingham, was Birmingham Alabama.

Dana Taylor:

That's Dr. Clarence Jones, Dr. Martin Luther King's personal attorney, and one of his trusted advisors.

Dr. Clarence Jones:

Dr. King assembled his closest supporters and he brought up his staff from Atlanta and Alabama to meet at the apartment of Harry Belafonte in New York to announce that their plan, next campaign was to desegregate Birmingham Alabama. I remember Fred Shuttlesworth, the local leader in Birmingham, publicly, directing his remarks at me. He says, now, Clarence, he said, I know you come down and work with us and you visit with us and work with us, but this is not Atlanta, Georgia. This is Birmingham otherwise known as Bombingham, because there were more unsolved dynamite bombings in Birmingham any other place in the south, and he was warning us of how dangerous the place was.

Dana Taylor:

The campaign to desegregate the American South sought to dismantle the laws and ordinances that separated and discriminated against African-Americans and disenfranchised them from voting. Segregation was enforced by racist, local and state governments and police departments rife with active members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Dr. Clarence Jones:

What Dr. King was proposing was to launch a campaign in Birmingham on a Good Friday before Easter in 1963, and he put on his jeans and a cap, and he led a demonstration in Birmingham and was soon arrested and thrown in jail.

Dana Taylor:

The Birmingham campaign lasted over a month in what became known as the Children's Crusade. Disturbing film footage of protesters being set upon by police was shown on nightly national news broadcast raising awareness of the situation in southern states. Alongside King the Reverend Ralph Abernathy was also arrested and jailed in Birmingham for violating a police order against marching. Abernathy's daughter Donzaleigh was a child at the time.

Donzaleigh Abernathy:

Because Birmingham had been horrible. They had turned water hoses and dogs on young people. All these young people were trying to do was to leave 16th Street Baptist Church and march to the Capitol and get down on their knees and pray for freedom, for justice, and for equality. And the Police Chief Bull Connor, to have the policemen turn the dogs on these young people and then he told the firemen to turn on the fire hose and the power of the water hose was so strong. Glenn Smiley, this white minister who had taught my dad and uncle [inaudible 00:04:23] the principles of nonviolence. He told me personally, he said, "Donzaleigh, the water hose was so strong, I witnessed it peel the bark off of a tree." And they were pushing that water hose, directing it a young children that slid across the ground like leaves, children.

Dana Taylor:

As his attorney Clarence Jones was allowed to visit King and Reverend Abernathy in the Birmingham jail. On his way in, he was confronted by parents of children arrested during a protest seeking help with bail.

Dr. Clarence Jones:

So when I walked in to visit Dr. King in his jail cell, I said, "Dr. King." I said, "You don't know what I went through to get to get here." And he didn't, it's almost as if he dismissed me. He didn't hear what I said. So I said, "Martin, did you hear what I said?" And he said, "But have you seen this?" So I said, "I don't know what you're talking about." And that this was a full page ad by the local newspaper, the Birmingham Heralds signed by a group of local clergymen, and I think one rabbi.

Dana Taylor:

The ad appealed to King for patience in dealing with the issues of segregation, calling him an outside agitator and asking protesters to obey the laws.

Dr. Clarence Jones:

I said, "Martin, the reality of what I face when I come here is I had to walk this gauntlet of parents want bail money and you're more concerned about this full page ad criticizing you." He said, "Take this." So I said, "What's this?" I'm sitting on a stool outside his small crowd of jail cell, and what he handed me were little clumps of paper, and those were writings that he had done in response to the ad. He is so agitated that he had already crafted in different parts an answer to every paragraph in the ad.

When he gave me the sheets of, of paper, he says, "Now, when you come back in here, I want you to bring me blank sheets of paper." So as instructed, when I got out, I took the little piles of paper and gave them to his secretary just to start typing. And what I dutifully did was that I took blank sheets of white paper and put them under my shirt as I went in to visit him twice a day. And it was these pieces of paper that I smuggled in under my shirt cumulatively became the sheets of paper that he wrote the Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

Dana Taylor:

The Letter from a Birmingham Jail was published in May of 1963, and it stands as one of the most important writings on civil rights. King spelled out the moral justifications for nonviolent action taken against immoral and unjust laws. He also called out the moderate white leaders for their silence on segregation. The document was a tipping point for gaining support for civil rights from white community leaders and politicians.

Speaker:

Now, the time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise. The events in Birmingham and elsewhere have so increased the cries for equality that no city or state or legislative body can fruitlessly choose to ignore them.

Dr. Clarence Jones:

President Kennedy, in response to a demand of a coalition of civil rights leaders met the civil rights leaders on June 21st, of 1963. And during that meeting, the civil rights leaders indicated that the president of their plans to have a march on Washington, but the march was going to be directed at Congress and the president and the attorney general were very upset about that. And the president objected because he said, if you direct your demonstration at Congress, Congress is going to feel that they're debating their new civil rights bill their trying to get through with a gun to their head. And he was very, very adamant that you could not do that. They were then urged to choose another site. They then conclude that they're going to have a march in August and they're going to hold it at the Lincoln Memorial.

Dana Taylor:

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was announced for August 28th, 1963. It brought together a powerful coalition of religious organizations, labor unions, and civil rights groups.

Donzaleigh Abernathy:

Oh my goodness. It was such an inspiration and it gave us so much hope. And I personally just thought, oh, we're going to be free. We'd already been in Birmingham. And my dad, he had come home from Birmingham from being in the jail, and I stopped him. I said, "Are we free yet?" And he was like, "No, Donzaleigh. We're not free." I said, "Well, then you need to go back to jail because I want to be free." And I said that. I was very serious. I did not like segregation. I did not like what it meant, so I wanted us to be free. And so this march was like, oh my God, the whole of America, look, it's not just black people, but it's white people and it's Native American people and it's Jewish people, and they're Christian people and Muslim people and we're all coming together because we want equality for everybody. So yeah, it was hope. It was a whole nation and a whole world was going to look at this and see this.

Dana Taylor:

The march was launched and directed by A. Philip Randolph, a civil rights and labor activist. Randolph's associate Bayard Rustin is credited as the chief organizer of the event.

Clayola Brown:

I heard Randolph's voice on the radio, that deep, heavy baritone voice that just, it was like a calling.

Dana Taylor:

That's Clayola Brown. The then 15-year-old Philadelphia resident was inspired to attend the march when she heard Randolph speaking about it.

Clayola Brown:

Because he was describing the inequities, but he was also talking about justice and freedom and all of those things as a young teenager that I thought was a responsibility of mine because that's what my family thought. And I knew very quickly that a Greyhound bus ticket didn't cost that much, especially if I babysat for a while. I could earn it and buy something to eat on the trip. But the excitement that grew around all of the conversations in the neighborhoods and the stores in the community where I lived talking about, oh my God, what would that be like to be able to see all of those famous people? Because they had talked about some of the movie stars, black movie stars that would be there, but they had talked about people like Mahalia Jackson too. It was just incredible to hear names of people that I held in high esteem being talked about as participants in this march. I just knew that I wanted to be there.

Dana Taylor:

Reverend Abernathy's, eldest daughter, Juandalynn recalls being in the capitol with her father and Godfather, the man she calls Uncle Martin.

Juandalynn Abernathy:

So I was eight, and I remember us going to Washington and being there. My father was very instrumental in explaining all of the time what he did, why he did it, and why it was so important that we participate. He said, "History is being made and you must be a part of it. You must see and witness history taking place." We saw it all happen.

Dr. Clarence Jones:

Dr. King was staying at the Willard Hotel in a suite with his wife and was working on the speech, and I had occasion to see him on the evening of August 27. He was very agitated, and we were going up in the elevator and I handed him a magazine with a yellow sheet of paper, and in that yellow sheet of paper I had written in longhand the suggested text of how he should open his speech. Now, let me just give you a little background that you would not know unless I told you. Dr. King was perfectly capable of writing anything he wanted to write in a speech, but he was the principal source of fundraising for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

And so if he was speaking four days a week, he hardly had time to do anything else. He was agitated because we had had a meeting earlier with supporters that he wanted to avoid. So I handed him sheets of paper in a magazine of how he might start a speech. His challenge was always how to start a speech. He thanked me and I just gave it to him, and I didn't give him any further thought.

Dana Taylor:

As organizers made final preparations, community groups around the country arranged caravans to bring people to Washington D.C.

Clayola Brown:

So we left on the early bus, got down to the Greyhound station. There were tons of folks there, but there were a lot of mother figures there too, which was also pretty awesome. We sat next to folks that had big brown paper bags because we knew in those paper bags there would be chicken, there would be sliced ham, there would be pound cake. That was the nature of the culture back then, and they did exactly what we had hoped. They fed us when everybody else was being fed. So we got a ride for $2.41, which was the price of the bus ticket, and we got food from the kind hearts that also rode the bus.

Dr. Clarence Jones:

Well, let me tell you something that is not normally known. We had spotters stationed along the major highways coming into Washington, and these people would call and tell us, we saw a busload of people, and the buses carried signs on the outside that said on the way to the march on Washington. So they would report to us because there was a little fear that we were calling this big party for people to come, and we had no idea whether anybody would show up. And the only way we got any indication of who was coming were these spotters who were standing in public telephone booths along the edge of the highway, and they would call in and say, oh, we just saw 10 buses or 20 buses.

Dana Taylor:

The organizers didn't know if people would come, but they hoped and prayed that they would. Bus caravans, trains and cars from across the country carried over 250,000 people to Washington D.C. that day.

Dr. Clarence Jones:

We didn't know it until it actually occurred. You have to stand. We assembled at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial. We did not know it until we looked out. This was at that time the largest assemblage of people in the history of the United States.

Clayola Brown:

And it wasn't just black kids, it was white kids too. It was kids of all colors. And we started talking because we couldn't get past the rope on the green, and some of the kids started to climb in trees, so we did too.

Speaker:

There's one of them in the tree.

Clayola Brown:

We could hear everything because there wasn't a whole lot of other kinds of conversations going on. It was really quite quiet. It was like being at church really.

Speaker:

Let us bow our heads in prayer.

Speaker:

(Singing).

Dana Taylor:

There were several speakers that day, including A. Philip Randolph and student leader and future Congressman John Lewis, but it was Dr. King's speech that reverberated across the country.

Dr. Clarence Jones:

And he's speaking, and as I'm listening to him speaking, I'm listening very carefully and my first reaction is that, oh my God, Martin must have really been tired. The reason I said that is because the first seven and a half paragraphs, the so-called I Have a Dream Speech, were exactly the words that I had crafted that he used. And so I was astounded when I listened to it. And as I said, my first reaction was, oh my God, he must have been tired. But as he was speaking the words I had written, Mahalia Jackson, his favorite gospel singer, was sitting on the stage with other celebrities and she shouts to Dr. King, "Tell him about the dream, Martin, tell him about the dream." At which point when she shouts, I'm standing behind Dr. King. He takes the written text of the speech, which I had crafted for him, and he moves it to the left side of the podium and he grabs the podium and looks out on those 250,000 people assembled and then begins to speak extemporaneously.

Clayola Brown:

I saw that he was very nervous and he was really nervous. You could see that he was, and he was trying to get himself together, and there were two women, one of which was that later on I found out that it was Mahalia Jackson when she was telling him to tell everybody listening, "Talk about your dream, Martin." And that's what she was saying while she was trying to get him to calm down.

Dr. Clarence Jones:

And I could see him standing at the podium and I could see his legs, I could see him, and this is important because once he started speaking extemporaneously, I could see him take his right leg and start to rub it up and down his left leg from the ankle up to the bottom of his knee. He started rubbing it up and down periodically with his shoe. And I had been around enough preachers to know that that was the signal that when Baptist preachers started to preach, well, at that point, I knew. In fact, I was so certain that this was going to be a whole change in quality and direction of Dr. King's speech.

I turned to somebody, I said, "These people out there don't know it, but they're about ready to go to church." And the reason I said they're about ready to go to church is because Dr. King had then before my very, very eyes become the archetype of the Baptist preacher. And so the entire speech from that last line in the written text that said, from the "Fierce urgency of now," until he gets near the end, and he said, "Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty free at last." It was mesmerizing.

Donzaleigh Abernathy:

It meant so much. It meant so much, and it still means so much to me as a human being to be able to have been there, to have been a witness to probably one of the greatest days in American history.

Dana Taylor:

60 years later, many are reflecting on the importance of the March on Washington and the impact of King's speech in today's world.

Juandalynn Abernathy:

It was his speech, I Have a Dream that just really brought it home, and we still have the same issues today in the 21st century that we had back then in 1963. I think that we as a people, and I'm meaning not just black people, people as a nation, as Americans, we need to sit down and think about, nothing has changed that drastically. When we talk about the anniversary and whatnot, we have to think about how far have we now come or what have we achieved?

Dr. Clarence Jones:

Where the country is 60 years later, I have feelings of great, great apprehension. I have feelings of great apprehension because just what I talked to you about, the coalition of white people who were principally Jewish who worked in our movement, I never thought that I would live to see the heat that would be directed at black people still in many instances by, there's no other way of put it by wanting police brutality. But the other thing that amazes me is that the rise of antisemitism. What is going on in this country?

Clayola Brown:

Several of those things that he talked about as a part of his dream certainly have come true, but then my heart breaks when I see how many pieces of it are being stripped every day. And at 74, almost 75 years old, I never thought there would be any rollback from some of the hard given struggles that we had to fight for, but they are being stripped away. I just wish that before the end of whatever this is, the existence that I can say that the job is done, but to this day, it has not been completed, and instead of ticking off things that are completed, I'm having to erase some of the ticks that are there, and that is so disturbing, so disturbing and disappointing because lives were given in the name of the struggle.

Donzaleigh Abernathy:

Well, a lot has been achieved, a great amount has been achieved. It's on each generation to demand freedom and to stand up for freedom, justice, and equality. We each have to do our part. Daddy and Uncle Martin did their part. Now it's on me to do my part. I was raised by people who were courageous and they were afraid. My dad used to say, "Uncle Martin was afraid." He said, "But courage is when you rise above, you go through your fear, and you still go forward and you still do." You have to have courage. Look at the courage in a man. Look at the courage in a woman. That's what we have to do. That's what we need to do today.

Dana Taylor:

Thank you for listening. For more on our coverage of the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington, you can find a link in today's show notes. Our gratitude to Grace Hauck, who conducted these interviews. This episode was produced by Mark Sovel. Thank you to Cherie Saunders for her production assistance. Our senior producer is Shannon Rae Green, and our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to [email protected]. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of 5 Things.