For the month of August, Morning Edition and The Race Card Project are
looking back at a seminal moment in civil rights history: the March on
Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
delivered his iconic "I Have a Dream Speech" Aug. 28, 1963.
Approximately 250,000 people descended on the nation's capital from all
over the country for the mass demonstration.
Through The Race Card Project's six-word stories, we'll meet some of the
people who witnessed that history and hear their memories and
reflections on race relations in America today.
This is the second in a two-part report about Clarence B. Jones and the March on Washington.
Aug. 28, 1963, was a tense day for Clarence B. Jones. As the longtime
attorney and adviser for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Jones had a
long list of worries as people started to fill the streets around the
monuments on the National Mall. Were the right permits filed? Would the
speakers veer off script? Would enough people show up?
"I had this feeling that we were going to throw a big party and nobody comes," Jones recalls.
But people did come — at least 250,000 of them. Still, Jones also
worried that the crowd might also include agitators, "some of what I
called 'agent provocateurs' — white as well as black," Jones says. "I
didn't know whether some of the black nationalists who were opposed to
Dr. King's non-violence, or whether some of the people from the right
wing, the Klan ... would provoke something."
Read more - Npr.org
Comments