For Jobs and Freedom: The Twenty-Two-Year March

August 28, 1963. A. Philip Randolph, 74 years old, walks to the microphone at the Lincoln Memorial as director of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. He has been trying to hold this event since 1941. Twenty-two years of organizing, of promises made and unmade, of building institutions and being outmaneuvered and building again. Two hundred fifty thousand people are in front of him. He introduces himself as an old man and tells the crowd what they have come to demand.

The march has a name. It is not "March on Washington." It is not "March for Civil Rights." It is "March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom," in that order, because A. Philip Randolph wrote it that way and Bayard Rustin built the day around it, because both men understood that civil rights without economic rights is an incomplete victory. The country would spend the next six decades proving them right.

The first march, the one that did not happen

The 1963 march had a predecessor. Most people do not know this. Randolph proposed it in January 1941.

By 1941, Randolph had already spent sixteen years building the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which he founded in 1925 when the Pullman Company employed more Black workers than any other private employer in the country and paid them poverty wages. The BSCP won its contract with Pullman in 1937. Twelve years of organizing for one contract. Randolph was not a man who gave up when things moved slowly.

On January 25, 1941, he publicly proposed a March on Washington to break defense-industry segregation. The country was preparing for war, the defense plants were hiring, and they were not hiring Black workers in decent jobs. Randolph's call was direct: "We loyal Negro American citizens demand the right to work and fight for our country." His framing was "Jobs and Equal Participation in National Defense," the rhetorical parent of 1963's "Jobs and Freedom." He set a target of 100,000 marchers for July 1, 1941.

The White House got worried. On June 18, Franklin Roosevelt met Randolph and Walter White of the NAACP and asked them to cancel. Randolph said he would cancel in exchange for a presidential order banning discrimination in defense employment. On June 25, 1941, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802: "There shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin." It was the first presidential directive on racial discrimination since Reconstruction.

Randolph called off the march. The FEPC was underfunded from its first day, defied by Southern employers, and dismantled by Congress in 1947. Armed-forces desegregation did not come until Truman's executive order in 1948. The FEPC's enforcement was weak and its life was short. Historians have argued for eighty years about whether the trade was a win or a sell-out. Both readings have sources, because both things happened. Randolph kept organizing. The fact that he spent twenty-two more years trying to get the march he originally planned is the clearest statement he ever made about what the 1941 trade had and had not accomplished.

Eight weeks

In the early summer of 1963, at 74 years old, Randolph revived the march. The frame was "Jobs and Freedom." He insisted that Bayard Rustin serve as deputy director.

Rustin: born 1912 in West Chester, Pennsylvania, raised Quaker by his grandmother. He had quit the Young Communist League in 1941 over the Party's position on segregated armed forces. He spent twenty-eight months in Lewisburg federal prison as a conscientious objector. He organized the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, the freedom ride that predated the Freedom Rides by fourteen years. He taught Martin Luther King Jr. Gandhian nonviolence starting in 1956. He was a Black gay democratic socialist Quaker who had been under J. Edgar Hoover's surveillance for twenty-five years.

In 1953, in Pasadena, he was arrested on a morals charge after being found in a parked car with two men. He served sixty days. The arrest became the hammer men with power held over him for the rest of his career. In 1960, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. threatened to spread a rumor that King and Rustin were lovers unless Rustin stepped back from SCLC. Rustin resigned. He had done nothing except organize, and the threat of his own identity being weaponized was sufficient to remove him from the center of the movement he had helped build.

Randolph wanted Rustin as deputy director anyway. Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young objected. Randolph did not move. On August 13, 1963, fifteen days before the march, Senator Strom Thurmond stood on the Senate floor and read Rustin's Pasadena arrest record into the Congressional Record, calling him a "Communist, draft dodger, and homosexual." He was trying to discredit the march by discrediting its organizer.

Rustin had already been organizing for eight weeks. The march did not stop.

The scale of what he built: over 200 paid staff working out of a Harlem headquarters. Two thousand volunteer marshals, trained. More than 2,000 chartered buses, 40 special trains, at least 10 airplanes. Twenty-two first-aid stations. Eight water-storage tank trucks carrying 2,500 gallons each. Twenty-one portable water fountains. Expected attendance was 100,000. About 250,000 people came. The entire operation ran on a budget Rustin estimated at $65,000.

He described the work himself: "We planned out precisely the number of toilets that would be needed for a quarter of a million people... how many doctors, how many first aid stations, what people should bring with them to eat in their lunches."

A Black gay socialist Quaker ran the logistics of the largest nonviolent political demonstration in American history to that point, on a budget of $65,000, in eight weeks, while a United States Senator read his criminal record into the Congressional Record to discredit him.

Labor's split

The organizing vehicle was the Negro American Labor Council, which Randolph had founded in 1955 precisely because the newly merged AFL-CIO was not going to champion civil rights from Washington. Seventeen international unions endorsed the march. The AFL-CIO's Industrial Union Department endorsed it. The UAW under Walter Reuther paid for the professional sound system audible across the National Mall, produced thousands of signs reading "Equal Rights and Jobs NOW," and chartered buses and planes from Detroit. District 65 of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, led by Cleveland Robinson and L. Joseph Overton, coordinated local organizing committees across New York and beyond. Robinson, Maida Springer, and the NALC's network of Black trade unionists built the march's organizational infrastructure from the ground up.

On August 12, 1963, the AFL-CIO executive council met. Walter Reuther moved for a full federation endorsement. One council member voted with him: A. Philip Randolph. The motion failed. George Meany held a news conference the same day: "AFL-CIO is not endorsing the August 28th March." The federation adopted a compromise allowing individual affiliates to endorse on their own, which meant the institutions with the political will to show up could show up, and the ones that did not could call themselves neutral.

Meany's stated objections, as recorded by Labor Notes and Herbert Hill, were fear of "disorder," that "people would get hurt," and that mass demonstration would "build up resentment in Congress." What sat underneath: an anti-communism that had spent a decade treating Rustin and Randolph's socialist labor tradition as contamination. The same political vulnerabilities Thurmond wielded from the Senate floor, Rustin's sexuality, his socialism, his communist youth, had been reasons for the AFL-CIO to keep him at arm's length for years.

On August 28, Reuther was the only prominent white speaker on the dais and the only major union leader to address the crowd. His line was the labor frame the moment required: "We will not solve the problems of education or housing or public accommodations, as long as millions of Negroes are treated as second-class economic citizens and denied jobs." That was the UAW's commitment, the ILGWU's commitment, District 65's commitment. It was not the AFL-CIO's commitment. The federation that contained all of those unions had declined, by a vote in which only one member voted yes, to make it a federation commitment.

The ten demands and the speech that got cut

The march's printed program carried a ten-point "What We Demand" statement. Here it is.

The ten demands: comprehensive civil rights legislation covering all public accommodations; federal funds withheld from any discriminating program; full school desegregation in 1963; Fourteenth Amendment enforcement including reduced congressional representation for disenfranchising states; an executive order banning discrimination in federally funded housing; attorney general authority to sue for constitutional rights violations; a massive federal jobs program placing all unemployed workers at decent wages; a national minimum wage of at least $2.00 an hour; a broadened Fair Labor Standards Act covering all currently excluded employment; and a federal Fair Employment Practices Act barring discrimination by governments, employers, and unions alike.

Six of the ten are economic. Six are about jobs, wages, training, and labor standards. The program does not describe a dream. It describes an agenda.

The $2.00 minimum wage deserves its own sentence. The federal minimum in August 1963 was $1.25 an hour. The march was demanding a 60 percent increase. In 2026 dollars, the march's $2.00 demand translates to roughly $21 an hour. The federal minimum wage in 2026 is $7.25, frozen since 2009. The march's agenda is still more ambitious than current federal law.

The evening before the march, the question of how publicly confrontational the movement was willing to be came to a head. John Lewis, 23 years old, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, had a draft speech ready. It called Kennedy's civil rights bill "too little and too late." It said there was "not one thing in the bill that will protect our people from police brutality." It pledged SNCC would march through the South "the way Sherman did" and "burn Jim Crow to the ground, nonviolently."

The draft leaked to the press. Archbishop Patrick O'Boyle of the Washington diocese, carrying Kennedy White House pressure, threatened to withdraw his opening invocation if the speech ran as written. The morning of August 28, in a room beneath the Lincoln Memorial, Randolph, Rustin, King, and others negotiated with Lewis and SNCC until minutes before the speeches began. The Sherman passage was cut. The "too little and too late" indictment was softened.

Lewis agreed, he later wrote, because Randolph asked him to. The man who had waited twenty-two years asked the 23-year-old SNCC chair who had been clubbed and arrested on Mississippi highways to hold the line a different way. Lewis said yes.

The original text was already in the hands of the press. What the country heard from the dais was the negotiated version. What the movement was actually prepared to say was in print the next morning, for anyone who wanted to read it.

The women erased from the dais

The "Big Six" were all men: Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, King, James Farmer, Lewis. The march's ten-person administrative committee included one woman: Anna Arnold Hedgeman.

Dorothy Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women, was not on the program. NCNW was not listed as a sponsor. Height sat on the platform that afternoon watching men she had organized alongside for thirty years take turns at the microphone.

On August 23, five days before the march, Hedgeman read a prepared statement at the final organizing meeting: "In light of the role of Negro women in the struggle for freedom and especially in light of the extra burden they have carried because of the castration of our Negro men in this culture, it is incredible that no woman should appear as a speaker at the historic March on Washington Meeting." She demanded a woman speaker.

The organizers compromised. A "Tribute to Negro Women Fighters for Freedom" segment would be added to the program: five women introduced by name. No speeches.

At the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, the tribute segment introduced Daisy Bates, Diane Nash, Prince E. Lee, Rosa Parks, and Gloria Richardson. Daisy Bates, standing in for Myrlie Evers, who had missed her flight, read a 142-word statement. It had been written by NAACP research director John Morsell. It was the only thing any woman said from the podium all day. Gloria Richardson reportedly had her microphone taken away after she said "hello."

The erasure was not accidental. Hedgeman had sent the letter. Height had made her position known. Pauli Murray, civil rights lawyer and future co-founder of NOW, was not on the program. Ella Baker was not on the program. The organizers knew exactly what the program was and was not. The compromise was a segment with no speeches, and the one statement a woman delivered was written for her by a man.

What the country took, what the country left

The march's first wave of demands came home. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 addressed public accommodations, federal funding conditions, and employment discrimination. Title VII established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the permanent FEPC that Randolph had demanded from Roosevelt in 1941 and Congress had killed in 1947. Twenty-three years to get a permanent FEPC. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 addressed the Fourteenth Amendment enforcement demand. Two of ten demands, substantially won within two years.

The other eight moved more slowly, or did not move at all. The massive federal jobs program was not enacted. The War on Poverty's programs were narrower and smaller than demand seven called for, and CETA was repealed in 1982. A universal federal jobs guarantee at decent wages has not been enacted. The $2.00 minimum wage demand was not enacted in 1963; the federal minimum reached $2.00 in 1974, eleven years later, and in 2026 stands at $7.25, frozen since 2009. Adjusted for inflation, the march's 1963 demand would be roughly $21.00 today. Domestic workers and agricultural workers, excluded from full Fair Labor Standards Act coverage in 1963, remain partially excluded today.

After the march, Rustin's marginalization resumed. In 1965, Meany backed the founding of the A. Philip Randolph Institute with Rustin as its director. The federation that had voted against endorsing the march built the institution carrying Randolph's name, with the march's deputy director at its head. Whether that is reconciliation or absorption depends on your reading of what the AFL-CIO had been opposing in the first place.

Reuther's closing line from the Lincoln Memorial was also his verdict: "This rally is not the end, it's the beginning of a great moral crusade to arouse America to the unfinished work of American democracy." He was right about "beginning."

The march was named for Jobs and Freedom. The country took the freedom part most of the way home. The jobs part, the minimum wage, the federal jobs program, the Fair Labor Standards Act extended to domestic and farm workers, was left with the labor movement that had split on August 12 over whether to march. The AFL-CIO's August 12 vote is not a footnote. It is the structural explanation for why six of the march's ten demands remain unfinished sixty-three years later.

Randolph opened that afternoon by noting that the Emancipation Proclamation had been issued one hundred years before, and the nation was still arguing about whether the people it freed were entitled to work at a living wage.

They came for Jobs and Freedom. They got the freedom part most of the way home. The jobs part is still in front of us, and the reason it is still in front of us is that the federation built to fight for it did not march.

Sources

The spine of this piece is William P. Jones, The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights (W. W. Norton, 2013). Randolph's biographical arc comes from Jervis Anderson, A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973). Rustin's biography, including the Pasadena arrest, the 1960 SCLC resignation, and the Thurmond attack, comes from John D'Emilio, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (Free Press, 2003). The Rustin logistics and AFL-CIO August 12 vote are drawn from Labor Notes' 2013 reconstruction and the Library of Congress blog "Inside the March on Washington: Bayard Rustin's Army." The ten demands come from the Civil Rights Movement Veterans' document archive and the National Archives program reproduction. The Lewis speech versions come from BillMoyers.com and the Zinn Education Project. Reuther's speech is from the Reuther Library audio and Timothy Noah's New Republic reconstruction. The women-erased section draws on Anna Malaika Tubbs's Brookings Institution analysis and biographical material on Hedgeman's August 23 statement. The Thurmond Senate attack on Rustin is documented at OutHistory.org. The full source list is in the frontmatter above.