march on washington. can i help you please? when i walked in the door, the phones were ringing. they range until i left around 5:30, 6:00. i recall a day that i ll never forget. i heard someone say where is this young lady who handles the phone, and finally i looked up, and there he was, dr. king. he said i want to meet this young lady. she has put me on hold twice and hung up on me once, and i want to know who she is, and i was so embarrassed, and he gave me a hug. we all knew there had to be somebody who coordinated the transportation, and byron turned to me and said in his sometime british accent, it s you, my dear. and i was totally horrified and frightened. how could i be the transportation director? i can t drive, which i capitoul. i was a new yorker. he said to me, no, you are
byron and i got up very early. we went out to the mall. there was literally nobody, and byron turned to me and said do you think anybody is coming to this march? byred took a walk on the mall to check on facilities, and the press was surrounding me and saying mr. restin, what s happening? you said there were going to be a quarter of a million people, and there are scarcely a half dozen here. bayard with tremendous applaud went into his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. taking my watch out of the other pocket, i looked at my watch. he looked at the piece of paper. he looked at the watch. i said, gentlemen, everything is going according to oil. meaning according to schedule. i said what are you looking at? he said nothing. it was a blank piece of paper. i was terrified that people weren t going to show up.
rights. there were the die-hard opponent racists, and that in the middle there were a mass of well-meaning white people who really didn t care, but if they could be shown that black people were determined, that their cause was just, that they could be won over to the cause of civil rights. negroes want the same things that white citizens possess. hold on, hold on no force under the sun can stand and block and stop this civil rights revolution, which is now underway. there have been demonstrations all through the south. this needed to come to a head. there needed to be a crescendo. and whereas byron was the only human being who probably could have organized the march on washington, a. phillip randolph was the only human being that
perversion. byron had been attacked both for homo sexuality and his political views because he was also a socialist and a pacifist. it was just one of these facts of life. he is gay. he doesn t hide it. i said to somebody once that never knew there was a closet to go into. the senator is interested in attacking me because he is interested in destroying the movement. he will not get away with this. i think byron was relieved it was out. it had happened. nobody thought that strom thurmond had anything good in mind by doing it. weeks before we were running out of buses and cars. i calculated that there would be approximately 67,000 people on the march, and i immediately got depressed because he had been predicting 100,000. we really got very worried, and
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