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Few contrasts between the two demonstrations were more striking than the different political and racial landscape of their setting. In 1963, Washington had no elected city government. The coordinator for the 1983 march was the Rev. Walter Fauntroy, who was once one of King's closest aides and now represents the city in Congress. The official welcome was delivered by Mayor Marion Barry, and march security was directed by Police Chief Maurice Turner, both blacks. Says Turner, who in 1963 worked a twelve-hour shift on the Mall as an ordinary patrolman: "When people get teed off, they want to march, they go to the nation's capital. This is not new for us." Indeed, although the first March on Washington attracted the biggest crowd ever assembled in the city up to that time, it has since been surpassed by several events, including the 1969 Moratorium on the Viet Nam War (300,000) and the AFL-CIO's 1981 Solidarity Day rally (260,000). But it was not the size of the crowd the first time that mattered so much as the force of King's vision. It seared the American consciousness with an impact that almost no one foresaw. Arriving in Washington during a national debate over black civil rights that was anything but decided, King carried the moral credentials of a crusader for a cause that was undeniably just. By peacefully assembling his masses in the nation's capital—and in front of network television cameras—he was able to enlist the sympathy of mainstream America almost in a single day and to win its support in finding remedies for the shame of racial discrimination.
Congress quickly sensed this sea change and responded with the greatest outpouring of human rights legislation in this century: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Says Andrew Young: "Up until the March on Washington the civil rights movement had been just a Southern thing and primarily a black thing. The march brought the movement into the North officially, and it became both black and white for the first time."
The new "coalition of conscience," as the marchers called themselves, speaks for segments of the nation whose combined numbers could make a difference on important issues. What remains uncertain, however, is whether they will be able to speak with one voice on any occasion other than a mass conclave in the August sun. The concept of conscience, after all, implies the will to do what is right. It does not necessarily follow, even in a coalition committed to joint action, that everyone agrees on what that is. Especially when many—blacks, peace activists, environmentalists, organized labor—are also competing to win public attention, and public support, for their own agendas. —By William R. Doerner.
Reported by Joseph N. Boyce and Jack E. White/ Washington