AP Was There: The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963 draws hundreds of thousands

For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. He told a reporter that the archbishop had “said he would not appear on the same platform with a speaker making this and some other statements in my speech.” So out came such passages as: “We cannot depend on any political party, for both the Democrats and Republicans have betrayed the basic principles of the Declaration of Independence.” In the advance text, Lewis said the Kennedy civil rights bill is “too little and too late” and “we cannot support it.” Upon delivery, Lewis said “we support the administration’s civil rights bill, but with reservations.” At 7:55 p.m. EDT, the last of the 23 special trains departed, and by 11 p.m. Union Station and the city’s two main bus terminals showed little sign of the earlier traffic load. William H. Press, executive vice president of the Washington Board of Trade, said that while he had no actual figures “I imagine business is off 80 percent.. There’s nobody in the stores.” Congregating at the Lincoln Memorial, the vast audience stretched far back toward the east end of the magnificent reflecting pool — toward the spot where in a semi-circular, separate pool, water lilies bloomed. Murphy’s boarding house.” “We must destroy the notion,” said Randolph, the president of the AFL-CIO Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, “that Mrs. Murphy’s property rights include the right to humiliate me because of the color of my skin.” A great cheer went up when Randolph announced that more than 150 members of Congress were in seats on the broad marble steps of the memorial. We are all responsible, East and West too.” What effect the march would have on Congress remained to be seen, though Ralph Bunche, world-known American Negro official of the United Nations, told the throng: “Anybody who cannot understand the significance of your participation here today is blind and deaf.” Coming here by train, plane, bus, auto — and even some on foot — the throng built up slowly but steadily to the estimate of 200,000, including Washingtonians.