Canadians March on Washington in August, 1963

Indelible Impressions Fresh After Nearly 50 Years

In the summer of 1963 I signed up for a ten-day Quaker Institute on Non-violence, organized on an island in Lake Rideau. One of the leaders told us he was heading to Washington, DC, immediately after training us, to take part in a civil rights march headed by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Two of us middle-aged ladies decided to drive down in my Austin Mini. We sent out an appeal for an additional driver and anyone else wanting to come.

Just before we left  Toronto, I cautioned the three young men who joined us not to tell anyone where this carload of white people was heading. At a gas station stop in Ohio, our destination was somehow leaked to an attendant.

“Hey,  whose side are you on anyway?” he snarled, spoiling for a confrontation. Surprisingly, he accepted the reply that came out of my mouth, “The human side.” We drove away, as he stood there with his mouth still open.

As Marches on Washington went, the one of August, 1963 was exempt from ugly incidents. Few false notes marred it, not even a couple of women preaching hatred on a street corner to non-responsive passers-by. The Kennedy administration had given most government employees a holiday, leaving the whole centre of the city at our disposal.  We later learned that the Washington police arrested fewer clients on 28 August 1963 than on a "normal" day in the full heat of the summer.

The crowd itself was so huge that even the marshals assigned to control it had to go along with its flow.  Luckily, it was a good-humoured, friendly flow.  We had started marching a little too early along a route too short to accommodate all of us.  Many of those who reached the Lincoln Memorial first had to turn back, so as not to be crushed by the sheer numbers following them.  We eddied about, finding spaces where we could, until everyone had had her or his "march". I saw a State Trooper pass on the movement of this vast multitude, as helpless as a leaf on a mighty river.

We eventually found some place to settle down, many of us on the grass quite far from the Memorial and its reflecting pool. King's address came well in mid-afternoon, after the wonderful singing of Joan Baez and Mahalia Jackson. (Marion Anderson, originally scheduled to perform, had not been able to get through the crowd to start the proceedings with the "Star-spangled Banner, and had wept bitterly.)

In spite of such deep disappointments and many smaller discomforts and difficulties, it was a blessed occasion. We saw and experienced much sisterly and brotherly love among the crowds that day under the burning sun of Washington. A black nurse had taken charge of me when I was about to faint from heat exhaustion.  Earlier, I had seen a Jewish gentleman look after a black girl who was also suffering from the heat and the strain. A black lad had offered to climb a small tree with my camera to get a historic shot of the crowd.

The crowd had been restless during the many speeches, and barely attentive to the singers.  Then Martin Luther King came to the microphone, and a hush fell over lawns, as the sun slanted gently from the west. King first evoked the wider issues, the promises of the U.S. Constitution. He went on to express the hope that his own "four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."  Then he said:

“I have a dream that right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and while girls as sisters and brothers.”
And finally his voice echoed out across the silent crowd:

“When we allow freedom to ring - when we let it ring from every city and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last, Free at last, Great God a-mighty. We are free at last."

The bountiful spirit of harmony, like a giant umbrella as wide as the sky, would give us the courage of our convictions.  But there would be big trouble further down a rocky road.

"Go back," King exhorted.  "Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, so back to the slums and ghettos of our Northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed."

I could sense the opening out of cracks in the apparent calm and tolerance in the north of the United States, and that when trouble did erupt it would be more violent than ever. I felt that, as the single mother of a small girl, I had too much at stake to get involved in what was bound to be a dangerous undertaking. This would be my first and last intervention in the United States of America.

Back in Canada, I concentrated on the Peace Movement, another deep concern of Quakers, until one day during a visit to Europe to see my future husband. On the top of the Salève, that long mountain overlooking Geneva, we had a fierce argument about my involvement in the Peace Movement.

That was the day I resigned from any further effort to tell anyone else how to achieve peace. If I could not have peace with the man I loved, then I was in no position to preach. Time to concentrate on peace of mind within myself and in my home.

Nearly fifty years later, I am convinced that it’s more vital than ever to feel safe inside, no matter what is going on out there. For a while it seemed like work to cultivate peace within. Now it’s getting more and more like fun. Believe it or not.