Women provided the muscle for the original March on Washington. Via ESPN's TheUndefeated: MarchonWashington
James Baldwin was right. The March on Washington in 1963 compromised itself to mollify its white critics, delaying what he called “an hour of reckoning.” It is the hour we sit in now. The hour of a revival of a nationalist white supremacy. An hour that includes the killing of Black Americans by the police.
However, to jettison the whole march to the dustbin of redundancy because Black folks are still petitioning for rights is to make another mistake — the mistake of overlooking the politically useful and radical work of Black women that happened in coordination with the movement and the march.
Often history and critics overlook the work of Black women because it occurs in the sphere of the domestic rather than in hot streets behind a megaphone and podium. Women’s lives become ignorable detail, detail subsumed in a portrait of something like a movement, a march where the emphasis is on the leaders, often male, who are making the speeches, meeting with the press and the politicos, standing next to the president while flashbulbs flare in the recording of thesemeetings.
Georgia Gilmore testified as a defense witness in the racial bus boycott trial of Martin Luther King Jr., on March 21, 1956, in Montgomery, Alabama.. In the poem, the speaker recounts the caring and careful work of one of these nameless women who fed activists and marchers headed to Washington in 1963 for the march.
.” It was these “unknown” women up and down the Eastern Seaboard who fed the sons and daughters of slaves and the sons and daughters of those who came to this land as free on front porches, with plates wrapped for those who could not stop as they descended on Washington to collectively demand freedom, justice, and jobs.
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