As a child, the March on Washington was my first realization of “the movement” — something that every adult I knew was talking about and engaged in. It was a seminal moment for the American Civil Rights Movement when more than 250,000 people convened on the Mall in Washington D.C. to show nationwide support for Black Americans to receive the same rights and freedoms as white Americans.

It was also a seminal moment for me. Saturday marks the 58th anniversary of the March, part of the pathway that undergirds my more than 30 years as a social justice change agent and led me to become the first African-American executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado.

There is still much work to be done toward the quest for equal rights and justice for all. The burdens are heavy but not impossible to lay down. May we continue to be inspired by the marches that came before us, the marches of today, and build a movement where peace can finally prevail.

Growing up in Atlanta during the 1960s, the March was more than a televised event. My neighbors in Collier Heights, a Black community on the National Historic Register, were actively engaged in the planning and execution of the March. Among them were Rev. and Mrs. Martin Luther King, Sr. and Leroy Johnson, the first Black senator in Georgia elected to the state legislature. Every adult I knew was sharing their time, talents, and tides to the movement, including my parents.

Leading up to the March, multi-faith groups and women’s groups were communicating logistics and providing food and water for those traveling. In 1963 in the South, Black people could not use public restrooms unless there was a sign designating it a colored restroom. They could not come through the front door to be served in restaurants. Most Black people brought their own food rather than face the humiliating experience of getting takeout from the back. My mother, a registered nurse, and my father, an electrical contractor, helped plan and raise money for the delegation from Atlanta, then boarded one of the dozens of busses to D.C. themselves.

Fifty years later, I would follow in their footsteps.

History has shaped the story of the March as an epic peak of the movement, that converted hearts and minds. But the timing and violent aftermath are often glossed over. The March was not an overnight matter, it had been in the works for decades. A. Phillip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Pullman Porters, proposed a march in 1941 to force President Franklin D. Roosevelt to integrate the American armed forces. He stated, “Power is the active principle only of the organized masses, the masses united for a definite purpose.” When the order was signed by President Roosevelt, plans for that march were shelved.

More than 20 years later, the idea of a march resurfaced after the election of President John Kennedy and the introduction of the Civil Rights Act. Congressmen from the South responded with a filibuster to keep it from going to a vote. The leaders of six organizations fighting for the equal treatment of Black people, known as “The Big Six”, came together and looked to Randolph’s blueprint.

The Kennedy administration, skittish that violence might occur, shifted from supporting the effort to attempting to control it. In the weeks following the March, there were violent reactions and acts by white people across the south, and on the morning of September 15, 1963, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham Alabama was bombed, killing four young girls arriving for Sunday school. Months later, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. After much pain, loss and shifting of public will, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was finally signed by President Johnson on July 2, 1964.

Decades later, as the executive vice president of the National Center for Civil and Human Rights and inspired by social justice advocate Stan Salett’s vision, I helped organize a group of college students to attend the 50th anniversary of the March. Their mission was to find people attending the 2013 March who were also there in 1963. The students were recruited and given a crash course on video interviewing techniques, and on the evening of August 23, 2013, like my parents and many others, boarded a bus in Atlanta bound for D.C. They collected more than 100 first-person stories.

That experience sparked my interest in identifying themes from the March and how they may be applied as lessons to the movements of today. Here are two lessons learned:

Among his final words, Big Six member John Lewis said, “When historians pick up their pens to write the story of the 21st century, let them say that it was your generation who laid down the heavy burdens of hate at last and that peace finally triumphed over violence, aggression and war.”

Onward.

Deborah Richardson is the executive director of ACLU of Colorado.

Originally published by The Denver Post: https://www.denverpost.com/2021/08/23/opinion-i-watched-my-parents-help-organize-the-march-on-washington-58-years-ago-and-the-movement-still-burns-inside-me-for-social-change/

When I was a sophomore in high school, my world history teacher started off the class period one morning with a question. He presented the class with a sweatshirt that all the teachers received as a gift from the school for the holidays. Along the sleeve of the black sweatshirt, in white thread, read the school’s name: DSST: Stapleton. He asked my class, “Should I take this black permanent marker and erase the name Stapleton?”

He then gave a short presentation about the history of our school’s name. Benjamin Stapleton was a leading member of the Ku Klux Klan when he was elected mayor in Denver in 1923. There was a Denver airport named after Stapleton and when the area was converted into a (predominantly white) suburb, the name was passed on to the neighborhood. My high school was then named after the neighborhood. In a school community that held high values around diversity and serving students from all racial backgrounds and walks of life, how did it make sense that our school was named after a white supremacist? Especially someone who had used their mayoral power to leverage one of the most violent hate groups in American history.

My teacher took a poll from each class period throughout the day, and the next morning had shown that the white supremacist Stapleton’s title was now gone, buried under black ink.

This presentation stuck with me because it was the first time in my K-12 education in Denver Public Schools where a teacher was being honest and open about Colorado’s racist history. More importantly, they gave us the right to choose how we felt about it and to exercise our own critical thinking skills.

He wasn’t the only teacher who was having these conversations with their students. Later on, many students and faculty in the community grew passionate about changing the school’s name. After years of organizing, debating, researching, voting, and pushing DSST’s board of directors, the name was changed to “DSST: Montview,” named after the street next to the school that sits on the cusp between the Stapleton and Park Hill neighborhoods. Recently, the entire neighborhood of Stapleton’s name has been changed to “Central Park” which is a result of the impact the school’s name change had on the larger community.

"Critical race theory isn’t about painting the United States positively or negatively, it’s about sharing the truth."

This is why critical race theory is so important, especially with America’s racist history. It’s unjust to everyone, but especially those oppressed, to not provide accurate information about the nation’s history. In the case of my high school, being open about Benjamin Stapleton’s racist history enacted positive change where people in the community banded together to denounce the ownership of the name of a white supremacist. Critical race theory technically wasn’t a part of the curriculum of that history class, yet my teacher had created such a huge impact because of how inspired our community grew to represent ourselves accurately and with respect to students of color. It’s important to recognize that the efforts to educate are what allowed for the community organizing and change to be possible.

Being in this school environment led me to become a part of clubs where I organized around social justice, and what ultimately caused me to major in Sociology and minor in Ethnic Studies. My Ethnic Studies minor gives me a perspective of the experiences and histories of BIPOC communities in the United States, while my Sociology major helps me understand and empirically measure the social conditions that allow for these oppressions and power dynamics to persist. Had I not been exposed to a community that made so many efforts to be socially aware of race and oppression, my life would be on an entirely different path. I would have never been involved with nonprofit organizations like ACLU that not only focus on racial justice in legislation but are actively against bans on critical race theory.

Critical race theory isn’t about painting the United States positively or negatively, it’s about sharing the truth. Too many of our history books paint the perspective of the U.S. as the victor or savior but are hesitant to share the truth of colonialism, domination and oppression. Many think that teaching critical race theory is unpatriotic because it includes harsher truths, but I would argue that it’s less patriotic to not own the nation’s history in its entirety, good or bad. The only way to move forward from our history of violence and put an end to cycles of oppression is to tell the full truth in order for accurate solutions to be created. Those against critical race theory don’t want the accurate history of the U.S. to be accessible because they currently benefit from how our systems operate as a result of historic violence and understand that their privilege could be revoked if the larger population were made conscious of these unjust moments in history.

Change is not possible if our nation continues to debate whether or not it's justified to be taught accurate information. If middle and high school age students were able to enact so much change from what they learned in a five-minute presentation of the racist reality of my school’s name, I can only imagine the amount of progress and the future we could have as a nation if critical race theory was included in K-12 education for all students in the United States.

Kristen Narona is an ACLU of Colorado summer intern and student pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and a minor in Ethnic Studies.