Walter Nagel

January 1963.

The 100 years since the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation have witnessed no fundamental government action to terminate the economic subordination of the American Negro.

Negroes seek, as an integral part of their own struggle as a people, the creation of more jobs for all Americans.

Therefore, the project described below must be a massive effort involving coordinated participation

by all progressive sectors of the liberal, labor, religious, and Negro communities.

The first day was to be sit-ins in the congressional offices of those who were opposed to civil rights legislation.

The second day was to be a mass demonstration

A. The project should call for action by the President and Congress listing concrete demands.

B. We should emphasize the theme that no worker in America is generally free.

We now demand a program of action in 1963 that will ensure the emancipation of all labor, regardless of color, race, or creed.

Well, Mr. Randolph asked me if I would set up the logistics for the march, which I immediately began to do.

And to get every agency in America, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, intellectuals, labor movement, everybody involved, and to contain it so it was intensely nonviolent.

He made us feel like we were players in history and that he took us seriously.

I was the transportation director of the March on Washington, and also I assisted Bayard generally during the march.

which included A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, the leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Whitney Young, leader of the National Urban League, James Farmer, of the Congress of Race Equality, John Lewis, of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Martin Luther King Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Jobs and freedom.

He indicated that there might be violence.

which would set back the cause of civil rights.

He said he would do so on one condition —

that he be given the right to name his deputy to do the day-to-day organizing of the march.