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Charles Euchner - Nobody Turn Me Around: A Peoples History of the 1963 March on Washington

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Nobody Turn Me Around: A Peoples History of the 1963 March on Washington: summary, description and annotation

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On August 28, 1963, over a quarter-million peopleabout two-thirds black and one-third whiteheld the greatest civil rights demonstration ever. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his iconic I Have a Dream oration. And just blocks away, President Kennedy and Congress skirmished over landmark civil rights legislation. As Charles Euchner reveals, the importance of the march is more profound and complex than standard treatments of the 1963 March on Washington allow.
In this major reinterpretation of the Great Daythe peak of the movementEuchner brings back the tension and promise of that day. Building on countless interviews, archives, FBI files, and private recordings, Euchner shows freedom fighters as complex, often conflicted, characters. He explores the lives of Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, the march organizers who worked tirelessly to make mass demonstrations and nonviolence the cornerstone of the movement. He also reveals the many behind-the-scenes battlesthe effort to get women speakers onto the platform, John Lewiss damning speech about the federal government, Malcolm Xs biting criticisms and secret vows to help the movement, and the devastating undercurrents involving political powerhouses Kennedy and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. For the first time, Euchner tells the story behind Kings Dream images.
Euchners hour-by-hour account offers intimate glimpses of the masses on the National Mallordinary people who bore the scars of physical violence and jailings for fighting for basic civil rights. The event took on the call-and-response drama of a Southern church service, as King, Lewis, Mahalia Jackson, Roy Wilkins, and others challenged the throng to destroy Jim Crow once and for all.
Nobody Turn Me Aroundwill challenge your understanding of the March on Washington, both in terms of what happened but also regarding what it ultimately set in motion. The result was a day that remains the apex of the civil rights movementand the beginning of its decline.

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Dedicated to Americas redeemers Bayard Martin Philip Roy Whitney John - photo 1
Dedicated to Americas redeemers Bayard Martin Philip Roy Whitney John - photo 2

Dedicated to Americas redeemers

Bayard, Martin, Philip, Roy, Whitney, John, James, Joachim, Carson, Matthew, Walter, Floyd, Rachelle, Cleve, Courtland, John, Walter, Mahalia, Jim, Marian, Medgar, Daddy, Fred, Ralph, Bob, the Gadsden trio, the Childrens Crusade, Lolis, Malcolm, Smallwood, Ossie and Ruby, Rudy, Matt, Daniel, Bill and Peggy, Dorothy, Andy, Wyatt, Haskell, Bernard, Joan, Patrick, Sam, Eleanor, Louis, Charlie, Cecil, Harvey, Michael, Spote, Coretta, Tom, Elliott, Michael, Dunbar, David, Harry, Odetta, Ella, Rosa, Len, Anna, Dorie, Joyce, Pauli, Daisy, Charlton, Ned, Jack, Burt, Dick, Fannie Lou, Carol, Lena, Jimmy, Robert, Ericka, Hank, Goodwin, Francis, Linda, Jerome, and countless others

with gratitude

That day, for a moment, it almost seemed that we stood on a height, and could see our inheritance; perhaps we could make the kingdom real, perhaps the beloved community would not forever remain the dream one dreamed in agony.

JAMES BALDWIN

I never realized it at the time, but it was time for a national conclusion. The March on Washington did not represent the opening of a new period, it represented the conclusion of the period of marches.

BAYARD RUSTIN

Authors Note

To create a pointillist portrait of the March on Washingtonwith views of the event from perspectives ranging from sharecroppers to presidentsI used a wide range of sources. My goal has been to bring this moment in history to life, showing people, places, and events, rather than summarizing or characterizing them. Some scenes were the products of recollections of sources. Whenever possible, I corroborated the events and words of the scenes from several sources. Other scenes were reconstructed from live television and radio recordings, transcripts, and notes that participants kept while preparing for the march, while participating or observing, and immediately afterwards.

This brief narrative necessarily offers only a partial account of an event that involved more than a quarter-million people. In selecting the characters and events, I attempted to produce an account that showed the wide range of people and groups, actions and reactions, and interests and emotions.

Please see the endnotes for more on sources.

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE
The Longest March

PART 1

PART 2

PART 3

PART 4

PART 5

PROLOGUE
The Longest March
Picture 3

ON A PITCH-BLACK NIGHT , a crescent moon barely visible in the sky, three teenaged boys walked along the gentle slopes of Highland Avenue on the edge of Lookout Mountain, then to U.S. Highway 11, north of their hometown of Gadsden, Alabama.

The oldest, a seventeen-year-old named Frank Thomas, led. The two younger ones, a sixteen-year-old named James Foster Smith and a fifteen-year-old named Robert Avery, walked ten or twenty feet behind. James and Robert tried to stay out of earshot of Frank.

Tall and lean, these boys became men during the summer. They didnt just play football in the street, act in school plays, walk up to the waterfall, or hang out on Sixth Street. They traveled the world, places like New York, Atlanta, and Birmingham. They learned from some of the legendary figures of the civil rights movement, like Julian Bond and John Lewis. They confronted the white supremacist mobs in the Gadsden demonstrations.

Are we really doing this? one of the younger ones said as they trudged along the road. Hes going to turn back, the other answered.

At about ten oclock at night, the teenagers began a journey of 675 miles to the nations capital. They carried a sign reading To Washington or Bust. Now, after midnight, they wondered whether they would really walk to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the grand finale of the civil rights movement in the sweltering summer of 1963.

Earlier that night, they gathered at Sip Harriss nightclub, one of the regular meeting places of the Gadsden Movement. James and Robert had just gotten home from a two-week trip to New York, where they raised funds for the movement by speaking about their experiences down south. Over Cokes, they told Frank about the famous people they met. Frank missed out on New York. He wanted one last adventure before starting school again.

The March on Washington is coming up, Frank said. Man, I sure would like to go.

Yeah, but we aint got no money, Robert said.

Well, Frank said, I been thinking of hitchhiking. I want to go bad.

Hey, thats a good idea. We could do that.

The conversation continued for a few hours. They debated whether their parents would let them set out on foot for Washington, D.C., without any real plan or money. They talked about how long it might take to walk. They didnt know whether they could hitchhike rides.

Its going to take a long time, Robert said. Thats a long way.

We have to leave now to get there in time, Frank said.

Then they stood up. Someone offered a ride to Jamess house in East Gadsden, then to Roberts house, near another nightclub and church where the civil rights movement gathered. It took a while to persuade Jamess parents, but Roberts mother said yes right away. Then they walked to Franks house and convinced his parents.

Then they walked up the mountain road, at the foot of Lookout Mountain. The road into the mountain begins long and straight, then twists every hundred yards or so on the way up, then straightens out again at the plateau.

Good thing it was dark out and everyone was sleeping. The road to Noccalula Falls was not necessarily the worst part of town for blacks, but no white parts of town were good for blacks in the summer of 1963.

Are we really doing this?

I dont know. I think so.

This fool is joking.

Hes going to turn around.

Frank turned around.

Come on up. Get up.

They passed a big house, set up on the hill on the left side of the road. That was the house where the most notorious killer in Gadsdens history was rumored to live.

They walked a couple hundred more feet. Robert moved out toward the center of the road. Then James moved farther into the road, to Roberts left.

Frank noticed the two drifting.

Wait a minute, he said. We all know where were about to be. This ought to inspire us. We dont need to be afraid. Lets have a prayer.

They approached the spot where a white Baltimore postman named William Moore, resting near a picnic table by the side of the road, was shot dead on April 23. It was on the border of Etoweh and DeKalb counties. Everyone knewor thought they knewthat the killer was the owner of the house the boys just passed.

William Moore was a marine in World War II and a former social worker, a white man who conducted a one-man campaign against racism. He protested a segregated theater in Baltimore and picketed the courthouse of his native town of Binghamton, New York. As a postman, he decided the best way to dramatize injustice was to deliver letters. He marched from Baltimore to the Maryland state capital of Annapolis to deliver a letter to the governor. He marched from Baltimore to Washington to deliver a letter to President John F. Kennedy at the White House, where a guard told him to drop it in the mailbox. Then, in the spring of 1963, Moore decided to march from Chattanooga to Jackson to deliver a letter to Mississippi governor Ross Barnett. The letter asked the governor to be gracious and give more than is immediately demanded of you.

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