What Dr. King didn't say: misremembering the March on Washington.

• Author: Marvit, Moshe Z.
• Position: The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights - Book review

The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights

by William P. Jones

Norton, 320 pp.

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On August 28, 2010, Glenn Beck held the "Restoring Honor" Rally in Washington, D.C., where he gathered approximately 300,000 people for a full co-opt of Martin Luther King Jr. The night before the march, Beck stayed in the same D.C. hotel where King had spent the night before the 1963 March on Washington; Beck stood on the same steps of the Lincoln Memorial as King stood when he delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech; and he had with him Alveda King, one of King's nieces, who has devoted herself to antiabortion activism. Beck's message, however, was significantly different from King's. It was a paean to the past and to the military, a patriotic religious revival that asked for faith in God and country.

Many were shocked by the brazen attempt by Beck, the man who famously called the first black president a racist who has "a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture," to transform the March on Washington into what he wanted it to be. But however cynical Beck's rally on the forty-seventh anniversary of the March on Washington was, it was not out of line with the general way that the march has been used and remembered in the half century since it took place. William P. Jones's new book, The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights, is timed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the march, and attempts to reclaim both the march itself and the radical history of civil rights.

Where critics of Beck's rally focused on the way that Beck's vision differed from King's, Jones's book does much to displace King from the center of the civil rights narrative. Though King's famous "Dream" speech has become the hallmark of the march, it was not representative of the day's events or demands. Where King's speech was optimistic and vague ("So we have come to cash this check--a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice"), the march had specific radical demands that had been debated for decades by the organizers.

The idea for a march on Washington came in 1941 from an anonymous black woman who shouted to A. Philip Randolph during a mass meeting in Chicago that "we ought to throw 50,000 Negroes around the White House, bring them from all over the country, in jalopies, in trains, and any way they can get there ... and keep...