Existing comment:
Organizers Plan March Strategy
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was organized in New York City in a Harlem office building. A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King, Jr., decided in May 1963 that the March would be held in August while Congress was in session, and on a Wednesday so as not to conflict with religious services over a weekend. Bayard Rustin, a leading strategist with experience in organizing protest demonstrations, was put in charge of coordinating the massive undertaking. Shown are organizers A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, and Anna Arnold Hedgeman planning the route for the march.
In 1941 Hedgeman (1899−1990) joined A. Philip Randolph's March on Washington Movement and became executive secretary of his National Council for a Permanent FEPC in 1944. Two years later she became Dean of Women at Howard University, and in 1949 assistant to the administrator of the Federal Security Agency. From 1954 to 1958, Hedgeman was an assistant to Mayor Robert F. Wagner, the first black female member of a New York City mayoral cabinet. During the 1960s Hedgeman advised the President's Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW) appointed by John F. Kennedy. The PCSW also drew leadership and advice from Pauli Murray, Dorothy Height, Dollie L. Robinson, and other civil rights activists. These same women pushed to include sex discrimination in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and helped to found the National Organization for Women. Hedgeman was the only woman on the organizing committee of the 1963 March on Washington. |