They arrived at two o’clock in the morning on Wednesday, August 21, a full week before the march. A cop directed them to the local office of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, where they saw Walter Fauntroy’s name painted on the glass. They called Fauntroy, the local minister who coordinated Washington planning for the March on Washington, from a phone booth. Fauntroy first thought the call a prank, but Frank convinced him they were serious, so he got up and met them. Fauntroy put the boys up at a YMCA for the night and gave them jobs for three dollars a day. They stayed in the dorm of a beauty school. Settled for a week in Washington, they met all the major figures in the civil rights movement—the march’s organizers, A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, Andrew Young and Fred Shuttlesworth, and the radical kids from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Rustin gave them money to supplement their wage. He also bought them bus tickets to return home.
The Gadsden trio and hundreds of thousands of others would mass on the National Mall, before the Lincoln Memorial, to appeal to Americans for civil rights. Seventy-eight percent of Americans now acknowledged that the nation’s racial problems “cannot be defended in the court of world opinion,” according to a Harris poll. Something, then, had to be done. But 55 percent of whites “would mind” a black living next door, 32 percent would mind their children going to school with blacks, 23 percent would mind going to the same church, and 21 percent would mind working side by side with blacks.
Since spring, the Gadsden boys watched and participated in the movement in its busiest year.
They went to Birmingham to help Martin Luther King’s assault on the most violent big-city bastion of segregation. Nicknamed “Bombingham” —more than fifty explosions had ripped the city’s homes and churches since the end of World War II, one just days before—Birmingham posed the movement’s biggest test. If segregation could be beaten there, it could be beaten anywhere. King and his team started with a campaign of sit-ins, which fizzled. On Good Friday, King marched downtown with fifty others; they were arrested and jailed. In captivity, King wrote “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” a document destined to be a classic statement of dissent.
Then the young people—high school kids, like the boys from Gadsden— took over the Birmingham campaign. On the first day of the “Children’s Crusade,” 600 were arrested; the next day, 250 more were arrested. Frustrated, police chief Bull Connor ordered his men to attack children with dogs and fire hoses, cattle prods, and nightsticks. One day, children spontaneously broke away from the march and dashed downtown, where they unfurled banners and signs. This symbolic takeover scared businessmen, who pressured the mayor to call a ceasefire and negotiate a settlement.
The Gadsden trio eagerly watched the news as 758 demonstrations took place in 186 cities, with 14,733 arrests. To track the civil rights wildfire, the Justice Department created a poster with a grid of activities across the country. “We didn’t want to rely on the alarmist statistics produced by the FBI,” said John Nolan, a Justice Department lawyer. “We needed honorable and legitimate data. Everything you have read about the FBI, how it was determined to destroy the movement, is true.”
The Gadsden boys even traveled north to help spread the movement. As they reported what was happening in Alabama to northern fundraisers and organizers, they got firsthand accounts of the explosions in Danville and Cambridge.
For almost three years, a broad coalition petitioned officials in Danville, a tobacco and textile center on Virginia’s southern border, to end segregation. The city council repeatedly rejected pleas to integrate public facilities and give blacks representation on public boards. The coalition filed a federal lawsuit in 1962 and launched a wave of protests downtown in 1963. When demonstrators blocked traffic, a segregationist judge ordered the protesters to disperse, issued a sweeping injunction against all forms of protest, and convened a grand jury that indicted protesters under the slavery-era John Brown Law. But the demonstrations continued, even after a “Bloody Monday,” when police—and a gang of deputized firemen and garbage men— chased protesters into an alley and beat and fire-hosed them nearly to death. As they lay on the ground, the police posse thrashed their curled bodies. By the end of the summer, six hundred protesters were arrested and stood trial in the court of the segregationist judge Archibald Aiken.
Events in Cambridge, a declining canning town on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, resulted in martial law. The Citizens Nonviolent Action Committee— the only adult-led chapter of SNCC—demanded not only an end to segregation, but also a concerted effort to give blacks better economic opportunity. Barely one in ten blacks lived in a family with a steady jobholder, most making starvation wages. When protests and counterprotests in June turned violent, with rock throwing and shooting, the governor mobilized the National Guard. In July, Attorney General Robert Kennedy brokered a “treaty” that called for the creation of a biracial human relations committee and an end to segregation in schools, housing, and public facilities. But a public referendum, scheduled that fall, endangered the few rights blacks already enjoyed. The city remained tense all year.
Violence swept the South all year. Vigilantes in Clarksdale firebombed the home of Aaron Henry, the head of Mississippi’s NAACP. After a gas bomb went off in a church in Itta Bena, Mississippi, mobs threw bottles and rocks at activists spilling onto the streets. Vigilantes shot into the home of college professors helping the movement in Jackson. A civil rights worker traveling from Itta Bena to Jackson was shot in the neck and shoulder. A bomb destroyed a two-family home in Jackson. Whites in the North Carolina town of Goldsboro ran down demonstrators in a car and threw bottles and rocks. Whites in Pine Bluff, in Arkansas, attacked civil rights workers with ammonia and bottles. Someone shot into the home of an NAACP board member in Saint Augustine. When nine activists prayed in a county courthouse in Somerville, Tennessee, police allowed hoodlums into the building to beat them up.
Calls for a national demonstration swirled through the civil rights movement for years. Some wanted to bear witness, to present a “living petition” to the president and Congress. Others wanted to disrupt the politics of the nation’s capital, with sit-ins at congressional offices and loud demonstrations outside the White House. Some wanted to highlight the economic plight of blacks; others wanted to focus on civil rights. James Bevel—who in the spring proposed that Americans from all over march on Birmingham—now wanted those marches to converge on Washington.
Marching to the nation’s capital from far away was what these three boys from Gadsden were doing.
In the week before the March on Washington, Martin Luther King met the Gadsden boys’ parents when he visited their hometown. The parents asked King to look after their children. That Saturday, King stopped by the Washington headquarters for the march, a vast warehouse at the black radio station WUST. The boys heard a commotion at the other end of the room. They thought it might be another bomb threat. Then they heard King’s baritone. King walked straight toward them. People parted.
“I just came from your home town,” he said. “I have to take care of something, but I’ll be back.”
After twenty minutes or so, King returned and talked for about a half hour with Frank Thomas, James Smith, and Robert Avery about their dreams and the movement.
The Gadsden trio worked all week making signs. They took preprinted signs—with slogans approved by the March on Washington committee, like “We Demand Voting Rights Now” and “We March for Jobs for All & Decent Pay”—and power-stapled them to wooden staffs.
The night before the march, the trio loaded those signs onto a Hertz truck to take to a green-and-white-striped party tent on the National Mall. Back and forth they went, loading and unloading the signs with bold red and blue lettering.
On August 28, 1963, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators would carry those signs down Constitution and Independence avenues in what Martin Luther King called the greatest demonstration for freedom in the nation’s history.
The prologue from “Nobody Turn Me Around – A People’s History of the 1963 March on Washington” by Charles Euchner
You can listen to Robert Avery’s account of that journey from Gadsden, AL to Washington, DC in his own words here.