Write About The March
Find research materials for journalists, columnists, activists, and community organizers celebrating and commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of The March on Washington.
Highlights
James Blue’s film is an artistic masterpiece.
James Blue’s film depicts a radical historical event.
James Blue’s film visualizes the civil rights movement’s commitment to nonviolence.
James Blue’s film climaxes with Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream” public address, which condemned American apartheid and set the agenda for the long civil rights movement.
James Blue’s film captures the most effective antiracist action in the US 20th century.
An artistic masterpiece
Representative review goes here
A Guide to Primary Source Materials for The March
The March reflected the influence of Pare Lorentz’s film The River and other social documentary films and photographs of the Thirties, Blue’s education in film studies at L’Institut des hautes études cinématographiques in Paris, and the directorial skills he had grown during his time in Algeria, where he directed a Cannes Film Festival award-winning feature. Blue directed a team of 13 camerapeople to film the marchers. We first see them in separate streams that merge at the Lincoln Memorial. The film was designed, as Blue stated “to lead up to and give King’s [I have as Dream] speech [the film’s climax] as much power as possible.” The film is laced with six freedom songs and bound to a minimalist narration written and spoken by Blue.
“[The March is] probably the finest argument for peaceful petition of redress of grievance that has ever been put on film.” [2]
Blue’s film received four international awards for its artistic and humanistic merit:
- Grand Prize in Documentary at the International Ibero-American and Philippine Film Festival in Bilbao, Spain (1964).
- Diploma of Merit at the 14th Melbourne Festival in Australia (1965).
- First Prize at the Cannes Youth Festival (1966).
- First Prize at the Netherlands Film Festival (1966).
Blue’s film was inducted into the National Film Registry in 2008 because of its “great cultural, historic” and “aesthetic significance to the nation’s cinematic heritage.” The film was restored and preserved by the National Archives in 2013.
A moment of radical history
The March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream speech” are radical history.
James Blue’s film provides the best image and sound capture of that speech.
James Blue’s narrative for the film, the marchers, and Martin Luther King Jr. in his “I have a Dream” public address forthrightly condemn America’s legacy of slavery, ongoing segregation, failure to treat blacks as equals in The March. The revolutionary agenda King and the leaders of the march set forth to work through America’s racial trauma had never been presented to a national audience and the government at one moment in American history.
More than any other event in American history, the March on Washington focused the nation’s attention on civil rights. [3]
The Long Civil Rights Movement and The March on Washington
The film visualizes the civil rights movement's commitment to nonviolence
James Blue’s film visualizes the March on Washington’s success: disciplined nonviolence, the civil rights movement’s counterintuitive response to hate and violence with love and nonviolence, and the construction of an inclusive community in direct physical contact with others.
African Americans, as James Blue observes in the narrative he crafted for The March, suffered under the violence of slavery and Jim Crow. King and the civil rights movement confronted Jim Crow with disciplined nonviolence and an ethic, derived from the principles of prophetic Christianity, that violence and hate should be met with nonviolence and love. Blue’s film documents the discipline and focus taken by those who participated in the march on Washington and the long civil rights movement.
Framing rhetoric: King's speech
James Blue’s film climaxes with Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream” public address, which condemned American apartheid and set the agenda for the long civil rights movement.
James Blue’s camera, which centers King in a long shot and medium shot, was ideally positioned to record King’s speech and the reactions of members of the crowd to his words. Filling nearly 7 minutes of the 30-minute film (roughly half of the speech’s total length), King’s words
include condemnations of the “vicious racists” in Mississippi and call out George Wallace for his support for state’s rights and the policy of nullification.
The film captures the most effective antiracist action in the US 20th century
The March on Washington helped give birth to three specific Presidential and Congressional actions: The War on Poverty, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which:
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- Reduced poverty
- Ended legal segregation
- Created the conditions for a multiracial democracy
- Improved the material well-being of Blacks and whites
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President Johnson’s War on Poverty, which he announced in his January 8, 1964, State of the Union address, helped reduce poverty by 50 percent by 1973. [12]
Clay Risen holds that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is “the bill of the century.” With its 11 titles, the act, according to one assessment, “changed the face of everyday life . . . and employment” in the United States. Hersch and Shinall observe: “The repercussions of the 1964 Act have been so great over the past 50 years that it is difficult to imagine what the United States would look like in its absence.”
The Justice Department reported that in some 53 cities in 19 states, approximately two thirds of hotels, motels, chain restaurants, bars, and libraries had been desegregated within four months after the June signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.108 Title VII of the Civil Rights Act “had a dramatic effect on regional labor markets, breaking down segregation barriers and opening a wide range of job opportunities to blacks for the first time.” [13]
Between 1964 and 1968, the southern states covered by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 saw a black voter registration rate increase of 67 percent (from 33.8 percent in 1964 to 56.5 percent in 1968). While only 6.7 percent of blacks were registered to vote in Mississippi before the act was passed, by1967, the percentage climbed to 59.8 percent. By 2012, 73.1 percent of African Americans were registered to vote, 2 percent higher than the national average. [14]
James Blue’s film captures an event that improved the material conditions of African Americans and White Americans, suggesting, as Stanford’s Gavin Wright observes, that the fruits of the civil rights movement were shared.
According to a thorough empirical study conducted by Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen:
The United States has made tremendous strides since the civil rights movement, in both dismantling formal institutions that were barriers to the American Dream and promoting an American creed of equality. Rulings like Brown v. Board of Education and important federal legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has made great progress in eradicating unjust institutions [15]
Stanford’s Gavin Wright, the dean of economic historians of the American South, has confirmed that the civil rights movement improved the material conditions of both blacks and whites, and the successful integration of Blacks did not lead to the displacement or replacement of whites. The title of his book captures the evidence that both blacks and whites “shared the prize” of desegregation and integration. [16]
Further Resources
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91 (2005): 1233–63.
David Lucander (2014). Winning the War for Democracy: the March on Washington Movement, 1941-1946. (Urbana, University of Illinois Press).
Letter, Edward R. Murrow to Lyndon Johnson 1/17/64, WHCF, Box 5, LBJ Library.
Joseph, P. E. (2014). Stokely: A Life. (New York, Basic Civitas).
Murray Kempton, “The March on Washington,” New Republic, September 14, 1963, p. 19.
William P. Jones (2013). “The Forgotten Radical History of the March on Washington.” Dissent 60(2): 74.
William P. Jones (2015). “The Unknown Origins of the March on Washington: Civil Rights Politics and the Black Working Class.” Labor 7: 35.
Chenoweth, E. and M. J. Stephan (2011). Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. New York, Columbia University Press. 201.
Chenoweth, E. and M. J. Stephan (2016). “How the world is proving Martin Luther King right about nonviolence.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/01/18/how-the-world-is-proving-mlk-right-about-nonviolence/
Gary May (2015). Bending toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy. Durham (London, Duke University Press), 201.
Zeynep Tufekci, (2017). Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. (New Haven, Yale University Press): 171.
William Sullivan to A. C. Belmont, Federal Bureau of Investigation (August 1963)
William P. Jones, “The Unknown Origins of the March on Washington: Civil Rights Politics and the Black Working Class,” Labor 7 (2015): 35.
Council of Economic Advisers, “The War on Poverty 50 Years Later: A Progress Report,” Washington D.C.: Council of Economic Advisors, 2014.
Clay Risen, The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2014).
Joni Hersch and Jennifer Bennett Shinall, “Fifty Years Later: The Legacy of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 34 (2015): 425.
Gavin Wright, Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 97, 10.
Elizabeth U. Cascio and Ebonya Washington, “Valuing the Vote: The Redistribution of Voting Rights and State Funds Following the Voting Rights Act of 1965,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 129 (2013): 379–80.
Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen, Deep Roots (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2018), 75.
Gavin Wright, Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013).
