On the day before the march, the Catholic archbishop of Washington DC, who was scheduled to give the opening invocation, received a copy of John Lewis’ speech. He freaked out.
-
-
Show this thread
-
Arguments over Lewis' speech continued during the march itself—even while speakers were addressing the crowd from the Lincoln Memorial, Lewis was huddled in a guard station inside, by the Abraham Lincoln statue, with Dr. King, A. Philip Randolph, and others, negotiating changes.
Show this thread -
Lewis was 23 at the time, by the way. King was 34. A. Phillip Randolph was 73.
Show this thread -
In the end, the group negotiated more than a dozen significant changes to the speech, each of which moderated its tone and substance and many of which have particular resonance today. The final typed version was completed just moments before Lewis took the stage.
Show this thread -
So what did they change? I'm glad you asked.
Show this thread -
The first problem came in the speech's second sentence, where Lewis said the movement couldn't fully support JFK's civil rights bill, because it was "too little, too late." That got changed to "we support it with great reservation."
Show this thread -
Why didn't Lewis support the civil rights act "wholeheartedly"? Well, this line, appearing immediately after the one above, gives an indication: "There’s not one thing in the bill that will protect our people from police brutality." That line was struck entirely.
Show this thread -
And right after that, a line referring to the bill's failure to "protect young children and old women from police dogs and fire hoses" had the words "in the South" added to it.
Show this thread -
(On several occasions, including right around here, references were added to the bill "in its present form"—not entirely unreasonably. The bill wasn't finished, and it was seen as more productive to push for improvements rather than reject it as inadequate.)
Show this thread -
Next, Lewis had written that the Kennedy civil rights bill ("in its present form" in the final version) would not "protect the citizens of Danville, Virginia, who must live in constant fear in a police state."
Show this thread -
Danville had been the site of ongoing civil rights demonstrations and boycotts that spring and summer, and the city government had reacted brutally—beating protesters, many of them high school students, using fire hoses on them, cramming them into overcrowded jails.
Show this thread -
Lewis' elders had him change "the citizens of Danville, Virginia, who must live in constant fear in a police state" to "...must live in constant fear OF a police state."
Show this thread -
Of all the changes Lewis had foisted on him that day, that one is maybe the most fascinating to me. "In a police state" is an emphatic statement about lived conditions, explicitly naming what it meant, what it was, to be Black in the Jim Crow South.
Show this thread -
"Of," on the other hand, is both tempered and ambiguous—the fear of a police state is a fear of something external, and maybe even hypothetical. A tiny change, but one that carries incredible weight.
Show this thread -
Next, Lewis went on to condemn the bill for not including voting rights protections. "As it stands now," his elders added, but that wouldn't be changed before the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. Voting would have to wait for the Voting Rights Act the following year.
Show this thread -
(A great line that Lewis' handlers didn't change: "'One man, one vote!' is the African cry. It is ours, too. It must be ours.")
Show this thread -
I would give a hell of a lot to have been a fly on the wall for any of the discussions between Lewis, King, and Randolph about the speech, but for the next big change more than (maybe) any other:
Show this thread -
Lewis had written that "For the first time in one hundred years this nation is being awakened to the fact that segregation is evil and that it must be destroyed in all forms. Your presence today proves that you have been aroused to the point of action."
Show this thread -
They had him take that whole paragraph out.
Show this thread -
Imagine. You're John Lewis. You're 23. You've written that the nation is being awakened to the evils of segregation "for the first time in one hundred years." And then A. Philip Randolph puts his hand on your shoulder and looks you in the eye.
Show this thread -
-
In the next paragraph, Lewis had written that "this nation is still a place of cheap political leaders who build their careers on immoral compromise and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic and social exploitation."
Show this thread -
They had him change that to "by and large, American politics is dominated by politicians who build their careers on immoral compromise [etc.]" and then add "There are exceptions, of course. We salute those."
Show this thread -
(I feel a little bad only concentrating on the changes here—the speech itself is amazing, even as delivered, and some of the stuff that stayed in is bracing even today. Full links to everything coming at the end of the thread.)
Show this thread -
That said, however, the next long passage to be excised in its entirety was fire:
Show this thread -
"I want to know, which side is the federal government on? The revolution is at hand, and we must free ourselves of the chains of political and economic slavery."
Show this thread -
-
"The nonviolent revolution is saying, 'We will not wait for the courts to act, for we have been waiting for hundreds of years.'"
Show this thread -
"We will not wait for the President, the Justice Department, nor Congress, but we will take matters into our own hands and create a source of power, outside of any national structure, that could and would assure us a victory."
Show this thread -
More rhetorical trimming: "To those who have said, 'Be patient and wait,' we must say that 'patience' is a dirty and nasty word. We must say that we cannot be patient," changed to "To those who have said, 'Be patient and wait,' we have long said that we cannot be patient."
Show this thread - 73 more replies
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.