On August 28, 1963, Chicago teacher and activist Timuel Black stood in the mall in Washington with 250,000 others and absorbed Martin Luther King Jr.’s soaring vision of a new kind of nation.
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“My feelings were, ‘There’s going to be a new world,’” Black says, “because he said, ‘I have a dream.’ And many of us were going to return home to help fulfill that dream.”
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Timuel Black was a high school teacher and president of the Chicago chapter of the Negro American Labor Council. At a national board meeting in January 1963, A. Philip Randolph, the NALC president, proposed a march on Washington to pressure the federal government for more aggressive civil rights and job-creation policies. “Those of us who were there looked around and said, ‘How in the world is he going to do that?’” Black remembers.
There were concerns among civil rights leaders, both in Chicago and nationally, that the turnout would be small, or that the protest would become violent—which in either case would hurt the chances of the civil rights bill stuck in Congress that would ban segregation in public facilities.
He explained the importance of the march in a guest column in the Chicago Defender in early August 1963. Black wrote that it was “strange” that Negroes had to spend time organizing and fighting for their rights, and demonstrating, as they would in Washington at month’s end. He lamented that he wasn’t working on other causes as much as he wanted to. He belonged to two peace groups, but in the previous four years, “I have attended exactly one meeting and read very little literature on this vital subject,” he wrote. “I have been too busy fighting for immediate goals” such as “freedom, justice, and equality for all men in general, but the American Negro in particular.”
Like some of the other marchers, Black brought his children, a 15-year-old daughter and a ten-year-old son. Rose, who was a few inches taller than Black, boosted the ten-year-old onto his shoulders so he could see the White House as they passed it.
Black and Rose were about 15 rows from the podium when the speeches began in the early afternoon. They recall a line of people sitting on the edge of the reflecting pool with their legs in the water.
