My father, who passed away last year, often shared this recollection of Martin Luther King’s March on Washington. Dad worked in Washington for IBM at the time, heading up what was then an all-white law department (which he made a point of integrating by recruiting and hiring some of IBM’s first black lawyers).
As the day of the March approached, a bunch of of his work colleagues warned him to stay home that day because there would be “riots in the streets.”
Later, he recalled, many of these same coworkers expressed amazement that the protesters were all so civil, peaceful and “well-dressed” (most of the men wore suits). He said that Washington was still a “southern city” in many respects in those days — with a lot of typically southern attitudes toward race among the whites who lived there — but that much of that changed that day. Not just MLK’s speech, but more importantly the behavior of the marchers caused a 180-degree change in their attitudes toward issues of racism and the need for civil rights.
“I’d never seen anything like it” he told me. “It was amazing how it changed people.”
