Lorain County residents remember March on Washington 60 years later

After an all-night train ride from Sandusky to Washington, D.C., an almost 18-year-old Sylvia DuVall and her sister, Joan, stepped out onto the Mall. It was a multitude of people, Sylvia told "The Sandusky Register" in 1963 after she and her sister and a friend were safely back in their Parish Street living room. Some wore coveralls, coming out of fields or off factory lines to join the procession led by Martin Luther King Jr. The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom saw King deliver his "I Have a Dream" speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, while more than 250,000 attendees watched on. DuVall, now sitting in her Lorain living room six decades later, said she was struck by how coordinated everything was. "It was really a feat of coordination with A. Philip Randolph and the unions — you think about it today, I know today we have email and it's much easier," she said, noting Randolph (a labor and civil rights activist) had threatened a similar march nearly two decades earlier but was convinced progress was being made after the military was integrated. DuVall's mother, Alpha, was a longtime leader of the Sandusky NAACP and sent her two oldest daughters on a 1,000-mile round trip to the U.S. Capitol. "I did not understand the weight of it … I was getting to be 18 and society used to protect children. I knew why we were going there — I may not have understood the really horrible things that underlaid the reason for the march," she said. "But it really did influence my life." She said later, "We went from the train station over to the mall and marched along that reflecting pool," she said. "What was amazing to me was the fact that there were so many people there, I never heard one word of descension, I never heard one word of frustration or irritation. Everybody was committed to what the idea behind the march was and determined to make this effort to change America, or to make America what it purports to be." Farther out in the crowd that day, a recent college graduate from Vassar College's group of friends melded with other early-20-somethings who'd come to Washington, D.C. to work. Nancy MacRae had just moved into an apartment in Georgetown with a college friend and another roommate and saw information about the march ahead of time. One of her roommates was "forbade" by her mother from attending the march, MacRae said, and her college friend had a class for her Master's program, so MacRae found another group to go with. "I have to tell you the tone of the whole thing … it was like a Sunday school picnic with 250,000 people," she said. "It was not a demonstration whatsoever — everybody was happy, it was joyful, it was very exciting and you think of all of the people who were there who were involved in the civil rights movement to speak." At 21 years old she understood the historical significance of the gathering, she said, but didn't know how profound it would really be, as no one could have predicted Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination less than five years later. She met her husband, James, in the crowd there. "He approached me," she said, an unusual thing for an African American man to do to a white woman at the time. "But we were all liberal, we were accepting everybody … so we just started dating." In August, James left for Germany and MacRae had just started work for the Peace Corps. And followed him overseas. "I made up my mind by the time May came," she said. "We actually married over there at the consulate." and would go on to follow him to Germany where he worked for the Foreign Service. The pair stayed in northern Germany for several years and would be married four years before the Supreme Court's ruling in Loving v. Virginia ruled laws banning interracial marriage were unconstitutional. "When he passed away we were 18 days short of our 50th anniversary," she said. MacRae, now a resident at Kendal at Oberlin, looked back on the march and how inspiring it was to hear King speak. "He was the important speaker, but everybody rose to the occasion," she said. She said she was conscious of the civil rights movement at the time — seeing news coverage of atrocities committed in the South, but it was the first time she'd really been involved in any demonstration. "We were young — why wouldn't we go?" she said. "It was the biggest event we'd been near, so there wasn't any question about going at all." MacRae's fellow Kendal resident Elizabeth Hole was around Sylvia's age when her parents let her take a friend's chartered plane from New York to Washington, D.C. after spending the summer at a Quaker work camp in Vermont. "Martin Luther King had been so well-revered and Bayard Rustin was a Quaker, so there was strong Quaker support for all of this at the time, so (my parents) let me go," she said. After finding a group she knew from Pennsylvania, she found a seat on the ground next to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. While her back was to the speakers, she was close, she said. Even at 18, what struck her was a group of individuals who'd walked from Mississippi to the March — the crowd parting to let the tired cluster of Black men and women through. "They were determined," she said. "They'd been taken care of, but they were all muscle, a little dusty, a little dirty, a little ragged and they had done it because they wanted to be there … it was like maybe I don't fully understand this." Hundreds of thousands hitchhiked, drove, rode buses or trains, or, like Hole, flew into Washington, D.C. for the event. But it wasn't until she was leaving, joining another friend on a bus back to Pennsylvania, when the magnitude of the crowd struck her, she said. Traffic seemed to stop to let a caravan of buses out of the area, one after the other through Prince George's County. "Where the road curved you could see bus after bus, after bus, after bus, after bus and my sense was that they had stopped stop lights just to let this convoy through," she said, adding the residents out on their porches as they passed by seemed to have a gratitude, and surprise, that so many people had come for the cause. "Somehow that was more powerful than actually looking out at the mall, that I really was part of something unique and that wouldn't be again," she said. The event became one of the most famous political rallies in United States history. When thinking about what a teenage version of herself told a Register reporter all those years ago, DuVall laughed. In an Aug. 31, 1963 article, DuVall remarked to the reporter about the songs the group sang, including "We Shall Overcome," and reportedly began to sing a few bars before her mother shushed her. When teenage Sylvia was asked why they took the trip to only be in Washington for about five hours, she replied: "The adults have been fighting for this thing for a long time. It's time we took up our own cross." She and her sister didn't hear King's famous speech until they got back on the train and listened to the replay on the radio while making another overnight trip home. It resonated with 17-year-old DuVall, just like it resonates with her 60 years later. It was a building block for many of the advances of the civil rights movement at the time, she said. She sees things as cyclical — the world now in a "downward spiral" with political tensions high, but it's also changed for the better. "There's a lot more support by the everyday average person for the rights and privileges of everyone being equal now," she said. "The problem is that we do have a group of people fighting to maintain the old ways and they're the ones who constantly show up at the ballot box … Unless we get a lot of people who are concerned and caring unless we make them understand that the political scene is not an obscene institution — that's the way we in America make changes for the good – and unless they embrace that idea and start showing up at the ballot box, then we're going to have our country run by a few people dedicated to their view of what the world should be." Contact Carissa Woytach at (440) 329-7245 or cwoytach@chroniclet.com.