From MLK to today, the March on Washington highlights the evolution of activism by Black churches

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August 22nd, 2023

Rev. William Barber II, with the "Poor People's Campaign," speaks to the group after they prayed inside of the Capitol Rotunda in protest of the GOP tax overhaul, Monday, Dec. 4, 2017, on Capitol Hill in Washington. Barber, now director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School, admires King immensely yet is critical of those who “water down the March on Washington to one man, one speech.” “That’s a political strategy to undermine the purpose of mass protest,” he says. “It must be a mass movement, not just a mass moment.” (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)

The March on Washington of 1963 is remembered most for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech — and thus as a crowning moment for the long-term civil rights activism of what is sometimes referred to as the “Black Church.”

At the march, King indeed represented numerous other Black clergy who were his colleagues in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. But the march was the product of sustained activism by a broader coalition. Black and white labor leaders, as well as white clergy, played pivotal roles over many months ahead of the event.

Moreover, the Black Church was not monolithic then — nor is it now. Many Black pastors and their congregations steered clear of civil disobedience and other nonviolent confrontational tactics in the civil rights era, just as some now steer clear of the Black Lives Matter movement and shun progressive Black pastors’ engagement on behalf of abortion rights and LGBTQ+ rights.

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