SNCC and March on Washington

Returning to Nashville, Lewis began advocating for fair employment in the city. With SNCC, he launched Operation Open City, a campaign to boycott and picket Nashville businesses that practiced racial segregation until they integrated and hired African Americans. At the April 1962 SNCC conference in Atlanta, Lewis was elected to SNCC’s executive coordinating committee. A month later, he was elected to the board of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Shortly after, Lewis set up shop in Cairo, Illinois, a small, rural, and segregated town at the southernmost tip of Illinois near Kentucky and Missouri. There and in nearby Charleston, Missouri, he set out to bring about change the same way he had in Nashville. At the same time, he played administrative roles in SNCC’s voter registration and direct-action campaigns in Mississippi and Georgia. When King organized the Birmingham campaign in April 1963, Lewis supported it from Nashville and made sure African Americans there were aware of it. Why was Lewis not in Birmingham or Mississippi or Georgia? His primary reason for returning to Nashville after the Freedom Rides was to study at Fisk. Even though he was completing a degree, he was still contributing as much as he could to the Civil Rights struggle. Further, people took notice of everything he had done and was continuing to do. Lewis’ election to SNCC’s executive coordinating committee and the board of the SCLC is proof, as is his appointment as SNCC’s chairman in June 1963. Moving to Atlanta, Lewis became even more involved in the movement than he already was. On June 22^nd, he attended a meeting with President Kennedy at the White House along with King and the leaders of other Civil Rights organizations. The subject of this meeting was the March on Washington. A. Philip Randolph, chief organizer of the march, wanted to march because “the disparity in the nation’s black and white employment remained outrageously grim. From jobs to average income, black America was in essence a country within a country-one modernized and affluent, the other undeveloped and destitute. And by raising their voices for justice, America’s black communities in the South were under attack as well. The year before had been like a second Civil War, with bombings, beatings and killings happening almost weekly. … Kennedy had been moved to introduce the civil rights legislation by the ugliness he saw in Birmingham. But he immediately met resistance from political leaders in the South, and within days he was already showing signs of backing off from the bill” (202). Randolph’s march would protest the treatment of African Americans and pressure Kennedy to pass civil rights legislation. Kennedy wanted the march cancelled, but Randolph did not budge. The march happened and Lewis was very involved in planning it. He also had to manage all of SNCC’s affairs, which took him to Greenwood, Mississippi, Pine Bluff, Arkansas, Somerville, Tennessee, Danville, Virginia, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina, Helena, Arkansas, Tchula, Mississippi, and many other destinations. Lewis had no free time, but he would not have had it any other way. On August 28^th, 1963, at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Lewis gave a fiery speech that elevated him into the national spotlight. It ended,

“We will not stop. If we do not get meaningful legislation out of this Congress, the time will come when we will not confine our marching to Washington. We will march through the South, through the streets of Jackson, through the streets of Danville, through the streets of Cambridge, through the streets of Birmingham. But we will march with the spirit of love and with the spirit of dignity that we have shown here today. By the force of our demands, our determination and our numbers, we shall splinter the desegregated South into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of God and democracy. We must say, “Wake up, America. Wake up!!! For we cannot stop, and we will not be patient” (224).

From Lewis’ view, the march failed to bring about any meaningful change. According to him, “the [civil rights] bill sank almost out of sight, mired deep in subcommittees. If it ever made it out, it would be in a horribly emasculated form. As for the jobs this day was supposed to hasten, they didn’t happen either. Randolph’s vision of economic change remained just that-a vision. The issue of jobs for black men and women still lay far beyond and much deeper than the scope of the civil rights movement at that moment. A mass march for “Jobs and Freedom” had, when the singing stopped and the cheering was over, done little to actually achieve either” (226). However, “it was a truly stunning spectacle in terms of showing America and the world the size and the strength and the spirit of our movement” (227). Nevertheless, the movement was not anywhere close to finished, and Lewis kept fighting.