Quotes

[on two activists and their contributions to the 'March on Washington', August 28, 1963] Bayard Rustin was a civil rights activist who played an instrumental role in developing the whole concept of nonviolence as protest action. He himself had been arrested about twenty times. He believed very deeply in something that A' Philips Randolph also believed in, and that is that the struggle for freedom in the United States had to eventually move to the center of power, to where the President and the Congress were - that no matter how many demonstrations took place in Montgomery and in Birmingham and places all around the South - until you could change the central government and have it legislate for all of the country, significant changes wouldn't happen. Randolph's contribution was a belief in mass action. Bayard added an organizer's ability, a concept of mass action and also of nonviolence. He had a mind that went to every aspect of organization. No aspect was too small, and nothing was too large. He would worry about the kinds of sandwiches that would be there, the nature of the sound system, how one dealt with the President of the United States.