FEMALE_1: The following program is a West Tennessee PBS special presentation made possible through the generous financial support of viewers like you.

Please visit westtnpbs.org and make a donation today, so that we can continue to make local programs like this possible.

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Peter Noll: The March on Washington in 1963 is still considered a pivotal moment in our history.

Hello, I'm Peter Noll.

Today, we're talking about that historic march and its impact and legacy.

Let the conversation begin.

FEMALE_2: That's so cool.

MALE_1: Then that's when I said that.

FEMALE_3: The problem with that idea is.

MALE_2: Wow, that was amazing.

FEMALE_4: Then I came up with a solution.

MALE_3: What was that about?

MALE_4: Here's what I think about it.

MALE_5: Now, we're talking.

MALE_6: West Tennessee PBS presents, Tennessee Is Talking.

Let the conversation begin.

Peter Noll: Today's Tennessee Is Talking looks back to a special show WLJT did in 2013 with Harrell Carter, NAACP President of the Jackson-Madison County Chapter.

Tyler Hawks hosted the program.

Tyler Hawks: This month, we remember and honor the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's famous I Have a Dream speech.

Dr. King is one of the most revered people in American history.

He was a Nobel Prize winner and remembered as one of the greatest civil rights leaders of the 1960s.

But back then, his impact on America's present and future was not yet known.

Harrell Carter Jr is the President of the Jackson-Madison County NAACP and joined us today on News Makers.

I know you are a busy man.

I really appreciate you coming by today.

Harrell Carter: Well, I try to get around as much as I can but it is certainly a joy to be with you this evening and with your listening audience.

Tyler Hawks: Thank you so much.

First of all, who organized the March on Washington?

Harrell Carter: The organization of the March on Washington actually began in 1941.

You had a sleeping car porter Mr. Rudolph who organized along with Mr. Bayard Kipling.

They started thinking about this concept 10, 15 years before, and they actually did a little bit of marching but it was more or less union related.

As a result of that, the planning got a little bit more expensive, extensive, and so you round up with the march that took place in 1963, where Martin Luther King gave the I Have a Dream speech, being the larger one of all the marches before.

As a matter of fact, it was the largest gathering of African Americans in the history at that time in any one place in this country.

As a result of organizing with organizations like the NAACP, the National Urban League, with the union representatives, with Catholic religious organizations, as well as Latino organizations, you had just a mass of people, who at that time, they were working up issues about wages, they worked on issues of freedom, economics, et cetera, and rights.

It's interesting story that went along with that.

It took six of those organizations to make the core group, otherwise, it would have never happened.

Putting in context, when you had the Kennedys, who was John Kennedy, who was just elected I think a year or so prior to that was historical event, and this event, the magnitude overshadowed his inauguration but also led cause for him to enact civil rights legislation which came about in the 64 Voting Rights Act in 65 acts that gave freedom to vote and to freedom to also do some other things that most Americans couldn't enjoy at that time.

So it was just the beginning of what took place later in that sequence of years that made this march as historic as it is.

The theme back then was jobs and freedom, and that carries on to this day.

Tyler Hawks: So that was the original intent was jobs and freedom, and then Dr. Martin Luther King has this amazing inspirational speech.

Who were some of the leaders of that time who were against the March on Washington?

Harrell Carter: Well, you had Malcolm X who was against it.

He thought it was some, with lack of better word, the dog and pony show.

He didn't think that it was going to matter much because he, at that time, believed that in order to really have a part in America, you had to be a little bit bolder than that.

He didn't have no meetings and marches, and speeches if you had to do something.

He was an advocate of becoming economical independent to where they could feed for themselves and doing things for themselves.

But this larger group which was made up of Roy Wilkins and one aspect of it.

The members of the IBW, George Mini, and several others.

They believe that working together as a coalition would be a lot stronger than as any individual unit at that time.

Tyler Hawks: Why was the march opposed?

Harrell Carter: Well, it was opposed because Malcolm X said and others that it was actually the Kennedy administration who made a lot of promises but hadn't followed through on any of them, that it should be more effort put toward encouraging them to do what they promised to do and there was others who thought that, well, this was something to divide the races if you can believe it at that time that it was not going to be but a militant march.

You even had 60 minutes, I think, did an interview with Roy Wilkins and Martin Luther King stating that, tell the truth, there's going to be a riot out there.

You can't control anything and this is just for a show.

You want the country to look at this whole thing as a militant movement.

You also had the FBI at that time by Mr. Hoover who said that this is going to be a lot of trouble and that we didn't need to amass these many people to cause a lot of all this damage potentially including the loss of human life.

He was very anti King.

So these are some of the aspects of the opposition to the march.

Tyler Hawks: Okay.

Why do you believe it was necessary to have the March on Washington?

Harrell Carter: Well, this was the first time in the history of our country at that time to where you had all of these groups coming together.

You had black, you had white.

It was 80 percent black, 20 percent others, including Latinos, you had whites, you had other people of ethnicity Native Americans, et cetera, come together for the single purpose of jobs and freedom.

Back during that time, you had certain jobs that was just not available to people of color.

Back during that period of time, you certainly didn't have the accommodations like you could go walk into a restaurant, et cetera.

You certainly couldn't get the same pay for the same work during that period of time.

It was really a call for actions on the part of those workers that had a lot of sweatshops back then.

As you know, there was a lot of inequality in that period of time from everything, from education, to health, to economy.

All of those things was converging on Washington.

This what made it so popular.

Tyler Hawks: Besides Martin Luther King Jr, tell us again about some of the people who participated.

He became, I guess, the one who was highlighted the most, but there were others who participated.

Harrell Carter: A. Philip Randolph was one of the key factors, him and Bayard Kipling.

Bayard Kipling was actually the organizer, but he was a gay person at that time, and wasn't looked upon very favorably by any groups of people.

He was said to have been communist by J Edgar Hoover.

So A. Philip Randolph, who had a brilliant mind of organizing, and particularly union organizations, did recruit him and because of his recruitment of him, they were able to really organize a really purposeful campaign.

The campaign changed a lot in these planning stages, but it finally got its start in June that year, when in the midst of all of this, and the Kennedy administration was also against it initially, but they eventually signed onto it because of the pressures being put on them to do something, let's have this march.

They were able to convince a lot of those leaders, and a lot of those individuals, including members of Congress, that this was the right thing to do, even though there was a lot of opposition to it.

But A. Philip Randolph, you did have the Kennedy to join in there later.

As a matter of fact, President Kennedy made a speech, I believe it was on June, I want to say 11th of 1963.

That speech was about equality and rights for everybody in this country who had toiled and worked to be a part of this country.

That same night, Medgar Evers was gunned down in his driveway in Jackson, Mississippi.

Tyler Hawks: Yeah, and where did the march began?

Harrell Carter: The march began all over the country.

There was a group that came from the South, from Selma, Alabama, that basically walked that route.

It took, as you know, probably several weeks in order to do it.

It was just a small group of people.

Some symbolically, walked for a few miles or so, maybe for 20 or 30 miles, and then left the trail.

But it was a pilgrimage to Washington DC.

The rest came by various travel modes.

Buses, primarily from all over the country.

You had from just about all states in the Union, had buses coming.

You had airplanes, you had trains.

As a matter of fact, New York, it was estimated that the bulk of people, came into New York as a hub at that time of transportation.

Then they filtered back towards the Baltimore, Washington, DC area.

But they ran 24/7 just to get the people in there.

They were expecting 100,000, they got 200,000.

Tyler Hawks: This is a lot of work, a lot of effort, determination, faith.

What did they hope the outcome would be, those organizers, you believe?

Harrell Carter: They wanted the attention of the leadership of this country to take heed as to what this group has been neglected for hundreds of years.

That they were a part of this great country as well and deserved to have the rights and privileges of any citizen of the United States.

I think they met those and they exceeded those, because after that, of course, you had the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

But in the '64, Voting Rights Act and the '65 Acts of other freedom opportunities you had, things begin to happen, slowly but surely.

Oftentimes, as you read the history, you realize that during those early and mid '60s was one of the most violent times in America, as far as civil rights goes, because we lost a lot of civil rights leaders.

A lot of people died during that period of time, black and white.

It was just a vicious time.

The South, not necessarily unlike the North, but more traditional in the South, where the bulk of this activity took place in terms of resistance.

I know that the Transportation Act of the early, it might have been late '50s that took place that gave public accommodations to any and all citizens was very much resisted in the South.

That's when you had the freedom riders to take buses and to go down to Alabama, the Carolinas, and Mississippis, and the Georgias, et cetera, to really prick the interests of our nation's consciousness because of the lack of access to public accommodation.

Then of course, you see the dogs and the beatings by the police, et cetera, which was at that time televised and which really changed the whole context of the conversation because people actually got to see what they've been hearing and they're looking at this beatings of citizens and of course, in some cases, even death.

When you had the bombings of the Baptist church in Birmingham.

Tyler Hawks: August 28th, 1963, it was a time when there's a lot of hope and dreams and what's interesting to me is that Martin Luther King Jr actually went to his script, but also spoke a little bit extemporaneously about his hope for a brighter future.

Do you remember listening to that on the radio or TV?

Harrell Carter: I did.

It was because we had a little black and white.

The screen was probably no bigger than that and it was grainy, and it showed them.

It was an interesting thing.

The I Have A Dream speech was not the speech that he had prepared.

The speech that he had prepared was a little bit different, but Mahalia Jackson, after he had said probably a couple of paragraphs of his speech, she hollowed out, "Tell them about the dream, Martin.

Tell them about the dream" because she had heard it.

This wasn't the first time he gave that speech.

She had heard it in Detroit months earlier and he just transitioned and it fit the time perfectly.

Tyler Hawks: I've read that Peter, Paul, and Mary actually were some of the performers.

It's like music brings everyone together somehow.

Harrell Carter: It does and the same thing goes for, what we're about to experience here with this march coming up this weekend.

It's not just the celebration of the anniversary, it's actually continuing to work that that group of individuals started.

We have several different performers, in fact, I think there were some performers that couldn't perform because it just didn't have the time and the space for them.

But I'm sure that the line up will be, and I hadn't seen the official line up yet, but we hear there's a lot of good entertainment access going to be there during that period of time.

Tyler Hawks: What impact do you think the march had on race relations today?

Harrell Carter: Not only the Civil Rights Act of the Voting Rights Act during that period of time.

There was a lot of coming together, a lot of groups after that period of time.

As I said, after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, there were certainly some raw feelings during that period and after that period of time, we have come together as a nation.

If you think about it, the forerunner of Dr. Martin Luther King and his dream, he stood on the shoulders of a lot of people that had prepared for that occasion.

Thurgood Marshall being one and his group of people, but also today's leadership in President Barack Obama.

Never, not my lifetime that I had ever expected for an African American to lead this country in that capacity.

Tyler Hawks: Yeah.

You spoke a little bit about the march and the theme of this year's march.

Why do you think it's important to have another march at this time in history?

Harrell Carter: Well, as great of intentions that that group had and they certainly had it and they did accomplish a lot, it is not yet finished.

We still have disparities in this country, with people of color with health disparities.

All you have to do is look at the statistics with education disparities, criminal justice system.

As I think that Attorney General Holder, indicated to the days that we have a lot of people involved in the criminal justice system that really shouldn't be there.

As a former law enforcement officer, I can tell you that worked in Drug Narcotics Division, I can tell you that a lot of these people are just sick and it is just a health issue.

A lot of people are strung out on a lot of these drugs and one of the major issues that goes unnoticed, untalked about is a lot of prescription drugs violations.

When I worked in narcotics, we had a lot of doctors who gave a lot of scripts primarily to the housewives.

We knew that there was too many because they'd give one here, give one there, one script there.

It was very difficult to prosecute those cases.

Now, on occasion, we had an opportunity to do so when the script was written to that extent.

But when you talk about the crack cocaine versus powder cocaine, the issues involved in that, where you get 10 times as much of a penalty of having crack cocaine as you would for powder cocaine.

They're both the same substance.

One is just prepared differently.

When you look at the criminal justice system, where the incarceration rate is far beyond the percentage of population in this country of people of color, then you realize that, well, are these all of the people that's doing the crime, or what?

We talk about black on black crime a lot, and it certainly any bit of it is too much and we certainly need to address that.

But it's six times more crime on white on white crime than black on black crime in terms of numerical numbers.

Now, the percentage is greater than the African American community because it's smaller and you have more people.

But in terms of percentage wise, but we have a community whether you're in Jackson, Tennessee, or in any place in the country where the crime issues can be dealt with in a more positive and a more strategic way, smart way than to do what we're doing by locking people up.

Remember, a lot of those people get out and then when they can't get a job because of their past discrepancies, then they do other things in order to make it.

That is foolish for us to continue to load that pipeline up like that, knowing that we don't have any way of addressing those issues other than through the criminal courts.

Right now, we know that this is overburdened, overworked.

Our police department cannot solve the problems that these communities create, so we have to think about it in a different way.

Education is a big key to that, because I think all statistics show that through education properly, starting at the earliest possible age, the statistics show that you don't get the type of behavior for those that either drop out of school or just socially pass or get out without having the proper credentials in terms of education.

We know that these people are causing the problems that we have in our society today.

So the smart thing to do is to educate them.

For every dollar we put into education, we get about seven or eight dollars back in terms of productivity in our community.

That's a fact.

But it's hard for us to change tradition.

It's hard for us to sometimes think outside of the box.

It's hard for us to really think about those things.

That the investment that we need to make in terms of our communities on the front end, so that we don't have to reap the consequences of non investment on the back end.

We're a lot smarter people in that and we do have it.

But it's going to take leadership on the part of local folks as well as on statewide and national in order to get this done.

Tyler Hawks: What difference do you think this march coming up, which is very important, what difference will it make going forward, do you think?

Harrell Carter: I think it's going to refocus us on the issues that we presently have today.

Gun violence is one of those particular issues.

When you look at the Trayvon Martin case, we realize that the stand-your-ground law is flawed.

That it does have some unfortunate consequences that I think we all regret.

It need not take place if we had the proper laws.

Gun registrations is some of the things we don't need working in law enforcement.

That law enforcement officer will tell you that there's more guns on the street than there are in police department.

We need to find a way to keep the guns out of bad people's hands.

Right now, it's just, you're finding teenagers with all kinds of exotic weapons, even the police don't have.

We cannot continue to address the problem in a way that we always have addressed it.

We've got to do it in a different way.

When you look at the issues of teenage pregnancy or unwanted pregnancy.

There's a solution to that.

It has to be managed better by meaning that you educate, educate, and you educate.

Again, the investment in children in the communities where they live, parenting skills are lacking.

Well, first of all, we can't prevent it.

Then let's make sure that we have training for those would be parents.

There's an awful lot of things that we can do to help alleviate some of the problems that we have in this community, but that's by being smart, being organized, and investing in our communities.

Tyler Hawks: Can you tell us a little bit more about the upcoming march and the plans for that?

Harrell Carter: Well, we're going to leave Jackson with our bus, and we'll be converging with other buses coming from all over the state as well as all over the country.

We're going to get into Washington at the wee morning hours of the Saturday, the 24th.

That is not the actual day, but since it's on that weekend, we can get more people to Washington because the actual day is the 28th, as you know, of just that week.

But what we're planning on doing is getting on the mall, getting on there early.

We'll do a symbolic march from Washington Monument, I think, to the Lincoln Memorial.

Then we'll have the program.

The program should be over at about 12 noon.

But during that period of time, you'll have several speakers, including President Barack Obama.

You'll have other speakers who will lay out agendas as they did back in 50 years ago about jobs and freedom.

They'll talk about issues and initiatives.

I think this is going to fire up a base of people that their forefront here has been silent too long.

I think the silent majority in this country has not spoken as of yet.

I think when you awake these folks, Black, White, Latinos, Asians, women, young people, you're going to realize that this country has changed and it's changing for the better.

The framers of the Constitution, realizing that there could be a lot of changes, they made the constitution rigid but flexible.

Where you could change it, you can adopt the different type things that you wanted to through a process.

I think that in this country, being as young as it is, 300 plus years old, we're still going through the process of trying to figure out what this country is, who we are as individuals, who we are as a country.

I think we're going to get there, but it's going to take efforts like this in order to do it.

Tyler Hawks: Harrell Carter, they say a good man is hard to find and you're definitely one of those good guys trying to fight the good fight every day.

We appreciate you coming by and being on News Makers.

We thank you so much.

Harrell Carter: Well, thank you.

Peter Noll: Well, that's our time for this edition of Tennessee is Talking.

Remember, you can stream today's program and all local Channel 11 programs on our app, the PBS app, the West Tennessee PBS YouTube channel, and on our website, westtnpbs.org.

I'm Peter Noll, until our next conversation, take care and thank you for watching West Tennessee, PBS's Tennessee is Talking.

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