Original marchers reflect on 50 years of history

“We were not scared of anything,” said Shirley — now Shirley Lawrence Alexander, retired from banking at 66 and owner of a catering company in Marietta.

Their parents, Leonard Albert Lawrence and Eunice Lawrence, had taught them to fight back.

“They wanted better for their children than they had. They wanted better for all blacks,” said Eunice (now Eunice Lawrence Harvey), who was 15 when she went to the march. “We lived in a society where blacks were on one side and whites on the other. The Constitution said things were equal, but they were not.”

The girls’ parents couldn’t get away to attend the march; Mother had two younger children to tend to, and Father had work at the Georgia Tire and Battery Co.

The girls had never gone out of the state without their parents, but they “did a lot of begging and pleading,” said Eunice. “Finally at the supper table, Father said to our mother, ‘That train to Washington will be leaving soon. We should let the girls go.’”

The night before the march, the sisters — along with dozens more from Albany — boarded a train for Washington. Mother and Father waved them off at the train station with shoebox lunches and some money.

“We knew it would be an experience we would never forget,” Eunice said.

Most sang and talked all the way to Washington. Others rested in preparation for the walk from the train station to the National Mall.

“When we stepped off the train, we were amazed,” Eunice said. “We could not believe the multitude of people we were about to join … That day made politicians change their minds. That day, we became powerful.”

The sisters carried Albany banners and wore dresses. It was hot.

“It was so crowded. Everybody was trying to get to the monument to get their feet in the water,” Eunice said. “We were trying to get to the front to see the Freedom Singers, because we knew them. We finally made it to the water and put our feet in it. We knew that if we went any further, we would lose each other.”

It was at the Reflecting Pool that the sisters heard King.

“What really got my attention is when Martin came to the microphone,” Shirley said. “It probably was – as far as the movement – the highest time I had ever experienced.”

After the speeches, the sisters walked back to the train station to head directly back to Albany. They never found the Freedom Singers, but the March gave them a voice.

From that point on, every day after school, Eunice registered voters. Shirley tried to enroll in the all-white Albany High School. She was rejected, “because there was nothing legally in place for them to let me go.”

But a year later, after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, Albany High was opened up.

“I was ready to integrate,” Shirley said. “I was ready to make a move, and the next move was the integration of Albany High.”

Shirley was one of six students — seniors from the all-black Monroe High — selected to attend for the 1964-65 school year. The names, phone numbers and addresses of the students were published. Threats and pressure followed.

Leonard Albert, known by everybody as L.A., got a call from his boss at Georgia Tire and Battery. Vendors and customers had started complaining about Shirley attending Albany High. Either Shirley would leave the school or L.A. would get fired.

L.A. quit.

“My father lost the job he had worked his whole manhood at, because my sister enrolled in a white school,” Eunice said. “But he didn’t care. It meant an awful lot to our family.”

Shirley graduated from Albany High in 1965, got married and moved to Atlanta. Eunice graduated a year later and followed Shirley to Atlanta in 1972.

“That period helped mold me to the person I am today,” Shirley said. “Who I am has a lot to do with the Albany movement and the march. I don’t think I would be who I am, had I not participated in it.”

Lonnie King: ‘Oh my God, they came”

Lonnie King was among the first people to arrive on the Mall on the morning of the March on Washington.

“I wanted to get a good location,” King said. “But we were a little bit concerned for a while. There were a lot of folks who did a lot of work trying to get people to come. We kept hearing that a lot of people were coming, but they weren’t there.”

So King (who is not related to Martin Luther King Jr.) sat on the steps, in Lincoln’s shadow, and waited.

“They started showing at noon. And then, you saw the buses start coming in,” said King, who was 26 at the time. “They just kept coming. It was wall-to-wall from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument. I said, ‘Oh my God, they came.’”

King was living and working in Washington, D.C. at the time, but his path there was paved with activist work in Atlanta. He was a member of Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he met Martin Luther King Jr. in 1945. As a Morehouse student, he was chairman of the Committee on the Appeal for Human Rights, which pushed for equal opportunities in employment.

“When Martin called the March on Washington, clearly I knew I was going to be there,” he said. “It was the first time African-Americans and others came together, en masse, to say racism and desegregation were wrong and needed to stop.”

Standing a mere 20 feet from the speakers, King was mesmerized by Rev. King’s speech, although he had heard snippets of it in the past.

“Being a member of Ebenezer, I heard parts of ‘I Have a Dream’ at least twice, but the world had not heard it,” King said. “He mixed several speeches into one coherent message. One of the beauties of a great orator is that he or she can seize the moment and say what needs to be said. That guy was a magical speaker.”

When the speeches were over, King lingered on the steps and watched the quarter million people file out. He moved back to Atlanta in 1968, three months before Rev. King was assassinated. Now 76, he is working on his doctorate from Georgia State University and caring for his wife, who has Alzheimer’s disease.

“To be honest, the March didn’t change me. It reinforced me,” he said. “I didn’t have to be convinced it was something we had to do.”

Charles A. Black: “When nature calls”

Let’s just cut to the chase on this one: When Martin Luther King Jr., was on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial delivering arguably the greatest speech of the 20th century, Charles A. Black was trying to find a bathroom.

He had to pee.

“As you know, it had been a long day of speeches and I had to go to the bathroom after a while,” said Black, now 72. “I was there when he began speaking, but I was two blocks away when he went into the ‘I Have a Dream’ part.

“When I was at Morehouse, I took Dr. King’s Seminar in Modern Social Philosophy class,” Black said. “So all of what he was saying at the time was not a unique experience for me. It was stuff I had heard before. So, at that point, the bathroom was a higher priority.”

He found one at a restaurant, where he also got a bite to eat.

But by no means was the meaning of the day lost on him. He arrived in Washington as one of the leaders of the Atlanta Student Movement, the 22-year-old editor of the Atlanta Inquirer, a fiery paper born out of the movement.

He rode overnight to Washington on a bus with other student leaders, including Julian Bond, arriving before dawn.

“I remember walking through the trees and how wet the ground was,” Black said. “My concerns were that nobody would show up and that trouble makers would come and cause problems.”

The people did come — more than 200,000 — and there was no trouble.

Black remembers helping Bond stand on a speaker to get a better view of the stage. He remembers brushing up against the legendary burlesque artist Josephine Baker, who had emigrated to Paris, as she made her way to the podium wearing a military jacket decorated with her French military and service medals.

At the end of the march, instead of riding the bus back to Atlanta, he hoped in a car with six other SNCC workers for the drive south.

“We were driving through Virginia, it was raining and everybody in the car went to sleep. Even the driver,” Black said. “I was awakened to the car going into the median, where the dip kept the car from tilting over.”

A state trooper came by and helped them get the car out of the median and back on the road. Tired and hungry, the seven drove to a roadside restaurant to get coffee. The owners would not let them in the front door and ordered them to go to the back if they wanted to be served.

“It was a shocker, coming off that big high of the march,” Black said. “It was a great day, with all the talk of brotherhood. So this was kind of wake-up moment. It hit me in the face. But it was a re-affirmation that the problem still persisted. We knew we still had work to do.”