By Dennis Myers – “Against the Grain”
Last weekend’s Glenn Beck rally on the site and date of the 1963 March on Washington got a lot of attention, in some ways pushing the normal anniversary coverage of the original march off the radar screen.
But some of it got through. I found out that Nevada’s former state schools superintendent and his wife, Eugene and Susan Paslov, were actual participants at the March.
In 1963, they were Peace Corps volunteers in training at Georgetown University and were warned by Corps officials to stay away from the March John and Robert Kennedy were nervous about violence and posted an operative, Jerry Bruno, to disable the public address system if they didn’t like the speeches , a warning the Paslovs fortunately ignored.
“Susan and I made our way to the speakers’ platform by the Lincoln Memorial and found some shade among those holding CIO and AFL signs. We waited for the speakers,” Paslov wrote last Sunday in Carson City’s Nevada Appeal.
“It was a sea of humanity that had a calming effect on a nation caught in the midst of racial turmoil,” Paslov wrote. “The sight and sounds were spectacular on that day in August of 1963. … Troops were standing by just outside the city, but were never needed. … There was no violence, only mutual respect.”
Just imagine being at that event, one of the most inspiring events of a generation and one that was two decades in the making.
The March was originally scheduled for July 1, 1941 by African American leader A. Philip Randolph, who wanted a massive march of 100,000 people to draw national and international attention to the plight of blacks. Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union, refused repeated pleas from President Franklin Roosevelt to cancel the March.
Finally, in desperation, Roosevelt signed an executive order throwing thousands of defense jobs open to previously barred blacks and creating a Fair Employment Practices Committee to enforce it. Randolph then cancelled the march. He finally saw it happen in 1963.
The association this year of Glenn Beck with that date and site got me wondering. Suppose the techniques of political manipulation — demonizing, belittling, trivializing, lying — had been as advanced in 1963 as they are now?
A few days ago, for instance, Justin Elliott wrote on Salon how the Islamic cultural center near New York City’s “ground zero” site was demonized by skillful public relations efforts. Almost nothing the public now “knows” about the center is true. A loony activist who has claimed President Obama is the son of Malcolm X I’m not making that up first inaccurately characterized the facility and falsely described the location. Others misrepresented the imam’s views. The opening date was untruthfully named as September 11. Conservative leaders were turned around on the issue, Laura Ingraham going from welcoming the Islamic center to demanding its removal. Rudolph Giuliani and Sarah Palin jumped in to exploit the developing storm. Soon a local dispute had become a national controversy because of a pack of lies.
If these cynical techniques had been applied in 1963, the March on Washington might well have been discredited in advance, with the result that there would have been no live television coverage and the public would never have become familiar with Martin King’s “dream” speech. The momentum for civil rights both in the nation and in Congress generated by the March would never have come to be. The cherished memories of folks like the Paslovs would not have the same meaning.
One of the reasons the civil rights movement was ultimately successful was that as it went on and whites discovered they were not alone — and the March was indispensable in this, television viewers seeing the thousands of whites who participated — they found their voices against racism and the climate of hate.
In 2010, with a national climate of mean-spiritedness dominating politics, it is another time for good people to be heard.
