This week marks the 60th Anniversary of the March on Washington. The energy and determination focused that day has improved the lives of millions of people. Voting, housing, education, employment, health care, and participation in public life were all pushed in a positive, more just direction. It is regarded as one of the most important moments in the advancement of American democracy.

The commemoration this year is taking place during unprecedented crises. Those hard won legislative gains have been eroded. Political violence is on the rise. Life for most African Americans, people of color, women, and working people continues to be fragile. The triple evils of militarism, racism and materialism have intensified in ways that are bringing us to the edge of global catastrophe. 

This is an opportunity to reflect on what we have learned over these six decades, and where we need to go if we are to secure a future. My thoughts have been drifting toward the 20th Commemoration.  Like the first one, 1983 was fraught with controversy. This time it was around the inclusion of women and an openly gay speaker. Only under mounting pressure and a sit in at the office of Walter Fauntroy, the congressional representative of the District of Columbia, there was a compromise that resulted in Audre Lorde being allowed to make remarks.  She was relegated to the “litany” section and barred from making a full speech. Her presence signaled emerging support for queer rights.

Just a few months prior to this commemoration, Audre Lorde was invited speak at Harvard to celebrate the legacy of Malcolm X. Perhaps, had she been allowed to speak more fully at the March, she would have why the specific history of the 1960s matters. She said:

As Black people, if there is one thing we can learn from the 60s, it is how infinitely complex any move for liberation must be.  For we must move against not only those forces which dehumanize us from the outside, but also against those oppressive values which we have been forced to take into ourselves.  Through examining the combination of our triumphs and errors, we can examine the dangers of an incomplete vision.  Not to condemn that vision but to alter it, construct templates for possible futures, and focus our rage for change upon our enemies rather than upon each other.

… Within each one of us there is some piece of humanness that knows we are not being served by the machine which orchestrates crisis after crisis and is grinding all our futures into dust … Each one of us here is a link in the connection between anti-poor legislation, gay shootings, the burning of synagogues, street harassment, attacks against women, and resurgent violence against Black people. I ask myself as well as each one of you, exactly what alteration in the particular fabric of my everyday life does this connection call for? 

…We who are Black are at an extraordinary point of choice within our lives. To refuse to participate in the shaping of our future is to give it up … Each of us must find our work and do it.  Militancy no longer means guns at high noon, if it ever did. It means actively working for change, sometimes in the absence of any surety that change is coming. It means doing the unromantic and tedious work necessary to forge meaningful coalitions, and it means recognizing which coalitions are possible and which coalitions are not.  It means knowing that coalition, like unity, means the coming together of whole, self-actualized human beings, focused and believing, not fragmented automatons marching to a prescribed step.  It means fighting despair.

…As Malcolm stressed, we are not responsible for our oppression, but we must be responsible for our own liberation. It is not going to be easy, but we have what we have learned and what we have been given that is useful.  We have the power those who came before us have given us, to move beyond the place where they were standing.  We have the trees, and water, and sun, and our children.  Malcolm X does not live in the dry texts of his words as we read them; he lives in the energy we generate and use to move along the visions we share with him.  We are making the future as well as bonding to survive the enormous pressures of the present, and that is what it means to be a part of history.