A radical message in the nation’s capital

Sixty years ago, Jean Shepherd — a popular commentator on WOR radio — hopped on a busload of everyday citizens bound for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. When he disembarked at the Washington Monument, Shepherd felt as if he was at a “family reunion” with a “holiday mood.” But had he looked closer, he would have also detected a militant mood.

Shepherd wasn’t the only one wearing rose-colored glasses. Numerous reporters said the event resembled a church picnic. They were partly right, but the march was much more than a picnic — it was also a radical demand to end police brutality.

At the Washington Monument, activists with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) held signs protesting the brutality that Black people endured throughout the South. One sign read, “Milton Wilkerson — 20 stitches. Emanuel McClendon — three stitches (Age 67). James Williams — broken leg.” They were the names and injuries of activists beaten by police officers in Americus, Ga.

Nearby, SNCC activist James Lee Pruitt carried a sign that read, “Stop Criminal Prosecutions of Voter Registration Workers in Mississippi.” Pruitt and other SNCC workers had recently been jailed for trying to register Black voters. In their jail cells, they were forced to sit nude in front of a fan. When one of the prisoners asked for a doctor, the guard said: “Sure, [n-word], after you are dead.”

Had Jean Shepherd looked closely, he would have seen about 75 young activists from Danville, Va., sharing bone-chilling stories of brutality. A few months earlier, police officers had clubbed them, and firefighters had trained hoses on them, until they couldn’t stand up. Now, they wore black armbands and sang, “Move on, move on, move on with the freedom fight.”

These young activists weren’t in Washington for a family picnic. They had come to tell the world about white violence against Black people. They were angry, militant, and on the march.

They weren’t alone, either. At the Lincoln Memorial, Rita Moreno — the star of “West Side Story” — faulted President Kennedy’s civil rights bill for its focus on desegregating public accommodations. “I protest the omission of police brutality in it,” she said.

Then there was Marlon Brando, who compared police officers in Alabama to German Nazis in World War II. The Alabama police, he said, used “indescribable tortures seen previously only in Nazi Germany.”

As he spoke, Brando held a cattle prod like the ones that officers had used to shock and burn protesters in Gadsden, Ala. When a reporter asked why he had brought the prod to the Memorial, Brando replied: “Because there is nothing so symbolic of the spirit of oppression than this — a cattle prodder.”

John Lewis, the young chair of SNCC, followed suit during the main program, criticizing the civil rights bill for excluding “Title III,” which would have allowed the Department of Justice to file civil rights suits in cases of police brutality. “Unless Title III is put in this bill,” Lewis said, “there’s nothing to protect the young children and old women who must face police dogs and fire hoses in the South while they engage in peaceful demonstration.”

Lewis was talking about the students of Birmingham, who inspired so many to attend the march. Bull Connor, Birmingham’s public safety commissioner, had ordered his shock troops to turn their German shepherds and high-pressure hoses against the young activists. Some of those scarred students were at the march.

How did Shepherd miss them? Why didn’t he mention them on his radio program about the march? Perhaps he preferred feel-good stories. Perhaps the reason had something to do with his white skin.

Whatever the case, he missed a perfect opportunity to tell millions of his listeners that the march was a living testament to the horrors of police brutality and the dreams of young people who had been beaten merely because they wanted equal justice under law.

Shepherd’s bias is not merely a point about history. Today, commentators across our country will focus only on Martin Luther King Jr.’s soaring dream, thereby ignoring the nightmares of all the victims of police brutality who cried out at the march.

Because we still fail to see their protest signs, hear their cries, and fulfill their demands, we continue to witness Black people dying at the hands of police officers who are quick to use any means necessary, including a knee on a neck, to assert their power and control. The nightmares of the hidden marchers have become ours.

Long is the coauthor with Williams of “More Than a Dream: The Radical March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” (FSG).