word patience as a nasty, dirty word. he wanted that out. so he did. the next day, randolph, rusten, ki king, all the giants of the program said, you have to tone it down because we re going to march through the south like sherman and burn down the existing power structure and that, you know, that would have in some ways that s what george wallace would have wanted. yeah. he would love that. and so king said, john, that doesn t sound like you. randolph said, don t ruin it for us. you read lewis today, not knowing what he was going to say, still seems like a very strong speech. we have a clip from john lewis speech. let s take a listen. leader stand up and say, my party is a party of a party of kennedy is also the party.
jack is right, kennedy risked if he stood four square in favor of civil rights, of losing the south. he had won by the slenderest of martins in 1960. so kennedy had in mind that there was a good chance he would be defeated in his bid for re-election, which would have been just a year later. one of the things that tends to be forgotten about the march is just how radical the leadership of the march was. king gets all the attention. and the speech was, in fact, the greatest speech i ve heard. but the driving force forces behind the march was a. phillip randolph, who created the brotherhood of sleeping car reporters and russert, the guy who actually organized this tremendous march, they were socialists. and rusten was a passivist
uncomfortable. that day power was uncomfortable in washington, d.c. if i could add a point about the sophistication required just to pull off this march the way that it was done and to keep things cool and make it this wonderful moment in american history. so byard rusten, imagining the logistics of bringing folks from all over the country. these were not rich people. had you to have transportation. you had to have places for them to stay. you had to have facilities during the march. you had to get people away from the scene after the march. i mean, this was a tremendous undertaking, as jack pointed out, in an era when you didn t have cell phones, the kund of communications we have now and they pulled it off without a hitch. that was a very sophisticate thing to do. you probably remember there is a famous photo of the march, leaders with banners stretched across the street held by 15 or