john, has been teaching for many years. i have learned much from him and much about this institution, so it's very interesting to finally see the place, since i've only heard about it from a distance. of course, coming to washington is not so unfamiliar for me. i have done many years of research obviously in connection with this book but i am also, someone was asking me just before, about whether or not i had washington ties. and i am someone who came from a family that is tied to washington on my father's side, both his parents came from washington and lived here. and that also ties into a question that i think is very pertinent and is asked all the time these days, why write a book on the history of marching on washington? and the way i think about that, now, is there's two answers. one personal and one more intellectual. so i'll start with the personal. i come from a family of people who march. as i did my research, i discovered the name of my great grandmother, among the women who had supported the cause of the national women's party, though she drew the line when they decided to start picketing the white house in pickets that were so decoreous in comparison to pickets of today they would scarcely attract a blink. she, however, thought that was a shameful break with tradition and withdrew her membership in the national women's party. my parents, as students, went on their second date to the youth march for integrated schools, one of the series of marches held by civil rights activists in the 1950's. this was in 1958. and as i started this book, there was a little family debate among my mother and father about whether or not my father had been at the 1963 march on washington for jobs and freedom. my father claimed that he had been. my mother reminded him that that was unlikely since he was teaching in indiana and had recently -- my brother had recently been born. one of those examples of how people sometimes create an attachment to an historical event that may not be quite appropriate. and then i, myself, began marching at a relatively early age. as i start mentioning in "marching on washington" my earliest march on washington took place when i was around 6 years old. and i don't actually remember clearly this event. i'm sure many of you have childhood events that you know you took part in but the only reason you know you took part in it is because there's home movies or for your generation home videos of it. so this march on washington in 1971 on april 24 and indeed that was the name of the march, suggesting how common marches on washington had become by that time, it was simply called the april 24 march, it was against the vietnam war, took place on a spring day and there's pictures of me with my father with his super eight camera shooting footage of it and my brother and i both standing around somewhat young for the crowd but carrying our "out now" signs. and so this personal history definitely is part of why i wrote this book. it seemed to me crucial at times in order to express my political views on any number of issues from controling the use of nuclear power to expressing my strong views about abortion rights, to march, to demonstrate and even at times to risk arrest. but when i came to think about this topic, i also came to it as a scholar. i was a student of a number of wonderful historians who came from both political history, jim patterson and social history, jack thomas, and the combination through the medium of women's history, mary jo buehl. and this combination of scholars helped me see that what i really wanted to do when i came to write first a dissertation and then in a major revision this book, was to do a topic in american history that would allow us to appreciate the way in which american citizens, ordinary american citizens, have influence on national politics. i felt that in the atmosphere of today in which it feels very easy to assume that because of declining voter participation, because of the clear influence of money and on politics, big businesses, that there needed to be an attention drawn to the way in which people participated in politics and in national politics. there are any number of wonderful studies that look closely at local politics from the viewpoint of participants, but it is harder and as i discovered when i tried to craft the stuff, harder sometimes to grasp how ordinary americans participate in national politics over a long period. so as i grappled with choosing topics and i kept running into amazing examples of marches on washington in the midst of other topics i was exploring, whether it was in a student paper that was written for me in a class on the march on washington for jobs and freedom, in which i had that feeling somewhat familiar to most people who have taught of being extraordinarily excited by what was on the page but wishing for ever so much more which wasn't on the page and wanting to know more and finding myself wanting to really understand this event, which had become so iconic for us all. we all know the "i have a dream" speech. we can all picture martin luther king. if you didn't already know it he was on a stamp recently for the "i have a dream" speech and you will be seeing him over and over again this summer as we come onto the 40th year anniversary of that speech. so i felt that it was crucially important to look at these events and find a way to study them that would remind us of how they related to each other. because one of the things i kept thinking was, wait. why -- why haven't we figured out what's the relationship? there's all these different marches. i keep running across them. but then when i went around to look and say, where is the book that tells me what's the rule on marching on washington or what's the history, there was no book. there was no guide. and so it seemed to me increasingly important to try and do that kind of study, to try to figure out the connections between these different moments of political demonstrations. so that's the combination of why i came to write this book. and what i want to do here today is use some examples from three marches of the ones i look at in detail in my book on the whole tradition to examine the most crucial question especially today, especially at this moment, the question of does marching on washington make a difference? does it matter? this comes up all the time. i wrote a piece that was published in a variety of forums that said, marches can change american politics. and this was a very -- somewhat upbeat, yes, go march. don't take it for granted. it's something to do, regardless of the issue. it was not, go, march against the proposed invasion, it was march for pro life, march for voting rights, march for the environment, there's a reason to do it. and i got a response from one woman in l.a. who said, you know what? marches make me tired. i'm sick of marches. you said that they inspire people. they just make me exhausted. they take up too much time. we really ought to be just working on local organizing. don't bother. they're not -- you shouldn't write this kind of stuff. i'm exaggerating a bit but she was clearly negative. and this was different than the negative comments where they accuse me of being a communist sympathizer and those i just deleted. i actually wrote back to her and said i appreciated her comments and felt that i was writing for a different audience and that i understood as an experienced activist she might want to stay home from a few, secretly thinking, maybe you should stay home from a lot for awhile and get a rest. so i want to talk about this. can marches on washington make a difference? and what can we learn by looking at the past? obviously, as i -- you already know my big answer, which is, yes. so it's more, what do we learn over time and why and how do they make a difference? so as we go back to that march in 1894, that was talked about by steve west, that march by a group of unemployed men, led by two rather strange individuals, mild mannered businessman named jacob coxi from ohio and carl brown, a flamboyant, labor organizer, newspaper editor, cartoon driver, supposedly a participant in the buffalo bill wild west show, we go back to 1894 and think about what these people thought they were doing. we realize it was a very different time. they believed, carl brown and jacob coxi believed that if they gathered together their supporters and if they walked to washington in what they called a petition in boots, that they would come to washington and that they would present their demand for an enormous public road building program on a scale that was unimagineable. but these men believed that if they came and they showed themselves as citizens in the people's capital that the members of congress would listen to them. they were wrong. they came to washington. they set up camp in brightwood racing track. they charged admission. they were not very rich. as you might expect. people flocked out to see them. but "the washington post" described them as being not unlike a third rate circus. and, indeed, they were roundly attacked for both the idea and the threat that they seemed to pose. the whole idea was attacked. the editors of "the portland telegram" called the mere proposal a sign of fatal blood poisoning in the republic. they attacked the leaders. they described carl brown as a red of as deep a dye as any that ever trod at haymarket. haymarket being the sign of a very controversial meeting by anarchists in chicago in 1888, which ended up with a conflict between the police that led to charges on eight anarchists who were sentenced to death, though some were not present at haymarket and some were eventually pardoned. so they clearly thought of this group, of brown, as a dangerous group in the eyes of traditional politics and the participants as a group were no better. they were dismissed by the editors of "the independent" not yet quite the progressive journal it was to become a few years later, they were dismissed as an army of tramps. and the editor declared that they ought to have no influence whatsoever on legislation or congress and, indeed, they did not belong to the bone and sin u -- sinew of the country. but they didn't just use rhetoric. they used law. when coxi's army marched down pennsylvania avenue, jacob coxi had discovered there were a number of laws that were going to limit what he thought he could do in washington. that his people's capital was not so open to him as he had expected. the police chief had politely informed him that there was a regulation passed in 1882 that forbid any organized group from parading on the grounds of the capital, from carrying banners, from making speeches, from using any part of that public space surrounding the capitol for a political cause. and that if you did so, you would be arrested. so coxi decided that he was not willing to risk arrest for all of the participants of the march. they did not plan to march all onto the grounds of the capitol. but he was determined that he had the right as an individual, just like all these other visitors who came to washington and went up the steps of the capitol and went inside the capitol building, sometimes even went in and lobbied and spoke to congressmen, that he, too, had that right. that he had that right to say his piece at the capitol. and when he did, he was arrested. they decided for a variety of reasons not to charge him with giving a speech. they recognized that that would be a pretty obvious tension with the 1st amendment granting the right of the people to peaceably assemble and to petition the government for redress of grievances. but instead, they charged him with walking on the grass. for this, they were fined and imprisoned for 20 days. it's not a small -- it's not quite the same as what even today people who engage in civil disobedience get. and it did rather deflate the power of coxi's army, which, though they stayed in washington for the summer, had a difficult time figuring out quite what to do with themselves and eventually were disbursed partially by being bribed with train rides home. so it was clear that the 1st amendment's guarantee of the right of the people peaceably to assemble did not at that time extend to these citizens who wished to use those public spaces in washington. so it would appear that this march made no difference. but it did plant a germ of an idea in many people's heads and in that way it did make a difference. it made people appreciate that perhaps there was a reason to use the public spaces of the capitol to petition for your cause. perhaps not exactly as coxi's army had, but in ways that might be powerful. for opponents of coxi's army, this was quite disturbing, and one senator cautioned his colleagues as he argued for a more repressive action to be taken against them that if they tolerated the march, that it is quite possible that it may become a habit to make pilgrimages annually to washington and endeavor to dominate congress. by the physical presence of the people. how little did he know he was going to be right. and, indeed, he was, to some extent, right, in the wake of coxi's army, groups began to think more and more about using public protest in the capitol as a means of furthering their cause, and you can see this in the evolution from the 1900's through the 1920's and 1930's. there is a growing acceptance of the notion that certain kinds of marches on washington, certain kinds of demonstrations i should say, because that term had not become accepted yet, the notion of a march on washington was not what they were called yet, you notice that coxi's army called themselves the petition in boots, tying themselves directly to the petition. in 1913, when the suffragists came they were a parade and pageant, tying themselves more to a tradition of both genteel display of good virtue and also of military parades down pennsylvania avenue were a common occurrence. but, nevertheless, when there was controversy about where they should parade, a police chief suggested that pennsylvania avenue with its collection of saloons and boweries was not the right place for dignified women and, instead, suggested they march down 16th avenue, which he saw as a respectable location -- 16th street, sorry -- as a respectable location, they protested vehemently. and they won the right to march on pennsylvania avenue. "the washington post", no fan of suffrage, supported their claim by equating the suffragists to any other citizen -- male or female. and, likewise, in 1932, when veterans of world war i came to washington seeking immediate payment of what they considered their just compensation for serving the country during world war i, the march that became known as the bonus march, when they came in 1932, they were tolerated. they were treated with kindness, president hoover arranged for the army to give them tents, a place to camp, opened up a navy hospital for them to be treated. the superintendent of police at that time actually had the distinct and somewhat strange role of being both the police chief of washington and the treasurer of the group behind the bonus march. so he was simultaneously in charge of policing them and making sure that their financial arrangements stayed on the up and up. so there grew to be a more common acceptance of the idea the political protest was something that was acceptable, and there were small gains from each of the demonstrations and direct policy turns. but one of the difficulties that i've struggled with, with this book, one of those interesting ironies, i would say, in historical studies, the kind of thing that makes you really have to grasp complexity and not settle for simple stories, is that if you want to look for a march that made a difference, a march that resulted in immediate and concrete changes in federal policy, then you have to look to what i call the march that did not happen. it was the threatened negro march on washington of 1941 that generated the most immediate and most obvious results of change in policy. it resulted in president roosevelt issuing an executive order, executive order 8802, that was the first federal order prohibiting racial discrimination by contractors outside of the federal government, by defense contractors. this is significant. there had already been, during the new deal, orders that on paper said the federal government should not discriminate on the grounds of race. these were not completely enforced by any means. but to expand the reach of the federal government to say that the federal government was going to intervene in cases of racial discrimination in private business, was a new thing, and it came because of a skillful threat to march on washington. the organizers of this march were different folks than the people who had organized coxi's army. a. philip randolph, an african-american labor organiz organizer, had years of experience in organizing and in protesting. he had developed new associati associations. he had led the brotherhood of sleeping car porters to recognition by both the mroman -- the pullman company giving african-americans a very real place in the labor movement and he had built alliances with many other african-american leaders of the time. he was a classic race man, as the term was of the time. when he looked around in 1941 and he listened to his colleagues notice and comment and complain and go to congress and go to the president and say, look what is going on, our country is preparing for war, we are in need of workers. we are in need of experienced soldiers. and your administration is tolerating segregation in the military that results in inefficiencies and results in discrimination against people who deserve promotions and new roles and looking around at defense contractor after defense contractor who refuses to hire african-americans, sometimes because they say their fellow workers won't tolerate it, and that was most certainly the case, and sometimes simply because it wasn't their practice. randolph decides that he is going to organize what he called a mass, mammoth machine of mass action with a terrific striking power. and he labeled this effort the nug rue march on washington -- the negro march on washington for defense. he wasn't shy. he didn't cloak his march in any other rhetoric. this wasn't a petition in boots. this was not a parade. this was not a new type of lobbying as one of the leaders of the bonus march wanted to call it. but this was a mass action that was going to change america. and he organized the very effective coalition and they started organizing and they got black fraternal groups and black churches and black newspapers to sign up and endorse the effort. and by late may, of 1941, for a march scheduled for june, 1941, president roosevelt was getting quite concerned. he described himself as much upset about the upcoming protests and he appealed to some of his friends who were african-american to stop the march. now, these genteel requests did nothing, randolph ignored them. roosevelt then decided to see what would happen if he made some concessions. he had an executive office. he had a memorandum issued that said defense contractors really shouldn't discriminate. but it really wasn't right. it wasn't the right policy. this had no force but it was sort of an advisory memo. he did this. then he sent his wife eleanor up to new york where the march was being organized and had her meet with the