WASHINGTON, Aug. 29, 1963 (UPI) - The greatest civil rights march in U.S. history, hailed as a huge success by its backers, gave new impetus today to the American Negro's centuries-old struggle for racial equality. A vast throng, estimated by Police Chief Robert V. Murray to have numbered more than 200,000 at its peak, converged on the capital yesterday for the rally - which resembled more a revivalist camp meeting than a militant civil rights demonstration.
At the end of a long and weary day, with words of praise from President Kennedy and Washington officials, they streamed out of the city by bus, train, plane and auto in the same disciplined manner that prevailed throughout the "March for Jobs and Freedom."
The President, who met with the 10 march leaders for more than an hour, said he could not help but be impressed with the "deep fervor and the quiet dignity" of the gathering. He pledged to push for new civil rights legislation, and to continue efforts for more jobs "and to eliminate discrimination in employment practices."
The Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, a Baptist preacher who was one of the leaders of the Birmingham, Ala., civil rights battle, said the march would "inevitably lead to an outbreak of little Washingtons all over the country."
"I shall propose a civil rights march through the South that will go straight into the black belt of Alabama and Mississippi this year and in 1964. We must provide 'little Washingtons' everywhere so that the Negro in the cotton field who can't get to Washington can have a chance to express himself," he said.
Floyd McKissick, newly elected chairman of the board of the Congress of Racial Equality, described the march as "the end of the Negro protest and the beginning of the American protest."
To 74-year-old Negro labor leader A. Phillip Randolph, tired and drawn from weeks of planning for the march, it was "the greatest demonstration for freedom in the nation's history."
The march leaders will meet in New York within the next 10 days to map further plans. These will include possible, continuous "counter-fillibuster" demonstrations in the capital should a Southern talkathon threaten President Kennedy's civil rights legislation when it comes up for congressional action later this year.
Chief Murray estimated that about 10 per cent of the marchers were white: estimates by newsmen and other observers ranged as high as 30 per cent.
Josephine Baker, the 60-year-old Negro expatriate who flew here from Paris, told the demonstrators they were "together as salt and pepper, just as you should be. You are a united people at last."
The marchers began arriving in the capital in the chilly hours just before dawn. At first it seemed the march might be a flop - only a half hour before it was to begin officially the police estimated the crowd at about 22,000.
But then the tide reached its flood. Dressed in their best clothes - "Sunday-go-to-meeting" suits for Southern farmers, the latest Paris fashions for young New York matrons - they streamed into the Washington Monument grounds.
By 9:55 they totaled 40,000, police said. Some 20 minutes later: 50,000. Then 70,000, 100,000, 125,000 until Chief Murray estimated that at the rally's climax they numbered more than 200,000.
A swaying forest of placards and banners sprouted, all reflecting the demonstration's principal theme: "Freedom-Now."
The leaders had scheduled the march-a symbolic eight-tenths of a mile from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial-for promptly at 11:30 a.m. But the marchers, hymn-singing and chanting, started marching sometime between 11 and 11:10.
Down 90-foot-wide Constitution Avenue and parallel Independence Avenue the great human tide surged toward the Lincoln Memorial, filling every corner of the mall. The crush was so great that some of those who fainted had to be passed hand to hand over the heads of the crowd to the first aid stations on the sidelines.
Military policemen at the base of the memorial tossed ice cubes into the throng to help the marchers cope with the 80-degree heat.
They heard speech after speech-and the theme was the same: "Freedom-Now." Speaker after speaker declared that the Negro had waited too long for equal rights, until finally came the most passionate cry of all from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
"The time is now," he shouted to the roars of the crowd. "The time is now."
Barely a half-hour later, the great march on Washington had ended.
