Responses to the March In the months after the March on Washington, ongoing demonstrations and violence continued to pressure political leaders to act. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of and the Voting Rights Act of were turning points in the struggle for civil rights.
Together the two bills outlawed segregated public facilities and prohibited discriminatory practices in employment and voting. Just two weeks after the march, on September 15, , white supremacists planted a bomb under the steps of the 16 th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The explosion killed four young girls attending Sunday school. This terrorist act was a brutal reminder that the success of the march and the changes it represented would not go unchallenged.
In the face of such violence, the determination to continue organizing intensified. High levels of black unemployment, work that offered most African Americans only minimal wages and poor job mobility, systematic disenfranchisement of many African Americans, and the persistence of racial segregation in the South prompted discussions about a large scale march for political and economic justice as early as Plans for the march were stalled when Udall encouraged the groups to consider the Sylvan Theater at the Washington Monument due to the complications of rerouting traffic and the volume of tourists at the Lincoln Memorial.
The March on Washington was not universally embraced. The executive board of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations declined to support the march, adopting a position of neutrality. Nevertheless, many constituent unions attended in substantial numbers. Johnson at the White House, where they discussed the need for bipartisan support of civil rights legislation. Carson and Shepard, Document Research Requests. The Institute cannot give permission to use or reproduce any of the writings, statements, or images of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Skip to content Skip to navigation. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. The March on Washington helped create a new national understanding of the problems of racial and economic injustice. For one, it brought together demonstrators from around the country to share their respective encounters with labor discrimination and state-sponsored racism. Through the mass participation of organized labor, students, religious leaders, and un-unionized domestic workers, the march also re-articulated for national and international audiences the extent to which racism and economic exploitation remained intertwined.
In a planning document co-authored by Bayard Rustin, the march's chief organizers explained that, "integration in the fields of education, housing, transportation, and public accommodations will be of limited extent and duration so long as fundamental economic inequality along racial lines persists.
In addition, the march helped to provide local activists with the moral authority to push back against less progressive forces in their respective home states, making a critical year, and the march itself a critical event in the transformation of local political regimes around the country. The economic injustice is something history sometimes overlooks. Can you talk about that aspect of the movement, and the types of changes for which the march paved the way?
At the start of the s, unemployment was not the principal economic problem facing black Americans; underemployment was. In New Orleans, Miami, and other Southern cities, for instance, African-Americans principally occupied unskilled, menial, and servile positions in agriculture or domestic work, sometimes in proportions in excess of 80 percent.
The March on Washington's organizers, therefore, asked for increases to the minimum wage, government programs for job training, increased protections against unlawful terminations, and improved access to unionized and municipal employment, which tended to carry retirement benefits, health benefits, and other employee protections.
Such demands paved the way for more robust defenses of fair employment laws and affirmative action. The March on Washington also helped give the Kennedy Administration a better appreciation of the degree to which African-Americans' grievances emerged from urban and rural underemployment as much as from more traditional "states rights" issues like voting discrimination and Jim Crow segregation.
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