With the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington just a week away, it’s a good time to think about the folks who dedicated and sometimes sacrificed their lives to the civil rights movement. Too often, though, we remember those individuals who have become icons, MLK, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, a few names come easily to mind. We dig deeper: A. Philip Randolph, Medgar Evers, Ida B. Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer, John Lewis, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth—there are many more, of course, all key players, (almost all since passed on). Still, there are people—those who worked behind the scenes; those whose actions although effective, did not make national news; those without whose sacrifice and sustained dedication, the civil rights movement would not have succeeded.
Five years ago American Legacy featured a story about Norman and Velma Hill, longtime activists who in 1960 began their career fighting for civil and workers’ rights on a beach on the south shore of Chicago’s Lake Michigan. It ended in a vicious attack that had serious consequences for the Hills. Velma lost a baby as a direct result of her head injury, and was tragically never able to have a child.
But this did not stop her or Norman from steaming ahead full force into lives of activism. For years they worked closely with civil rights and labor leaders A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin on campaigns such as the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The last part of the march’s name was deliberate—“for us, along with Randolph and Bayard, the economic component was essential in obtaining freedom and equality for black people,” says Norman Hill in a forthcoming memoir about his and Velma’s life together as activists.
The march, held on the centenary of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, brought Martin Luther King, Jr., to the consciousness of millions of people worldwide. It helped to galvanize support behind what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But the peaceful march of thousands was not an idea that sprang fully realized from King, the culmination of all of the sit-ins, protests, boycotts, and marches that had come before it. Randolph, the Hills knew, had threatened Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt more than two decades earlier, in 1941.
“By the winter of 1962, Randolph, again with Bayard at his side, was considering another march on Washington. But this time it was to pressure and call attention to America’s still unkept promises to its black citizens, now 100
years out of chattel bondage,” says Norman Hill, “yet still burdened with glaring economic, political and social inequalities. It was early the follow year and in this atmosphere that Velma and I were summoned to Randolph’s
office in Harlem. . . .
“When Randolph called, you came, and you came willingly.”
The Hills, who at the time were both working for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)—Norman as national program director and Velma as a field worker, were tasked with helping to figure out how to bring together all the major civil rights groups, or what the consequences would be if they could not galvanize what Randolph called the Big Six: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); the National Urban League, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and Randolph’s newly created Negro American Labor Council.
“What Randolph wanted was the entire movement on board, the left and the right, and the labor movement as well,” says Velma Hill.
He wanted a coalition. And he got it. His decades of experience and the respect the leadership of each organization had for him paid off. The Hills believe that no one could have brought everyone together like Randolph. Says Velma, “When he started talking, people got still.”
While Velma worked out of CORE’s New York headquarters, Norman traveled to oversee the organizers in cities strategic to the march in the Northeast, the Midwest, and the upper Southern states. By April of 1963 the date for the march—August 28—had been set. Norman worked with the local branches and chapters of the Big Six, later the Big Ten, including the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice, the American Jewish Congress, the National Council of Churches, and the United Automobile Workers.
“Wherever I went, I could feel the enthusiasm for the march. So it wasn’t difficult for me to convey that this was something big, something important, and that all who could be a part of it, must,” says Norman Hill. “I depended on the local people to contact and encourage broader support, including religious groups and whites.”
“Norman and I knew it was special, but it really didn’t dawn on us until it happened just how special that day really was. It was a Wednesday that felt like a Sunday. . . . There was this air of real excitement. People were saying hello to people that they didn’t know. People were shaking hands and people were looking for people they knew. It was just wonderful.
“I wasn’t with Norman at the march. I saw him and said hello to him, but I wasn’t with him.”
People were told to arrive at the Washington Monument by 10 a.m., where they could pick up signs to carry. The New York Times headlines read the next morning: “200,000 March for Civil Rights in Orderly Washington Rally; President Sees Gain for Negro.”
“I could see that Velma had positioned herself near the front of the platform that was set up on the base of the Lincoln Memorial,” says Norman. “I was on that platform, at the back of the stage near Bayard, who was a chain-smoking, perpetual motion machine that day.
“On the platform, I was so close that I did not need the public address system to hear what was being said, and sang, at the podium. It was a tremendously good feeling standing there, being enveloped in a special atmosphere, looking out on all those people swept up in a massive celebration. It was like Velma said, unique, a unique spirit, a unique, great, huge outpouring of humanity.”-Audrey Peterson
