The March on Washington Through a Child's Eyes

I was at home when the March on Washington took place in 1963. My parents took my four older siblings with them, but at the last minute decided that, as the youngest, I should stay at home.

I was furious about being left behind. My parents had talked about the march for days leading up to the big event. They determined that having a 7-year-old might be a safety risk given fears of possible violence (which, of course, never materialized). I cried because I saw myself, even at that tender age, as an activist who belonged there, side-by-side with my family and Dr. King.

The civil rights movement was a big deal in my house. During the previous year, when no babysitters were available, I would go door-to door with my parents in my hometown of Baltimore asking people to register and exercise their right to vote. They were passionate about voting rights and felt that if the African-American community could elect its own representatives, the substandard schools, roads, and public transportation, along with the pervasive evil of Jim Crow racial discrimination, would start to get the attention they deserved. They were evangelical in their quest to register Black voters and I was a young true believer and compatriot on their mission.

My mother, Madeline Murphy, was treated very badly by a segregated Baltimore. She once had a miscarriage in a store where she was not allowed to use the "whites only" restroom and she never got over the indignity of having to endure that physical and emotionally devastating incident in public or being abandoned in a health crisis. My father, William Murphy, got a scholarship from the state of Maryland. But it paid for him to go all the way to the integrated Oberlin College in Ohio rather than admit a black man to the University of Maryland. He went to Maryland's law school only after Thurgood Marshall sued to admit Black students. After graduating and passing the bar exam, he was not allowed to join the Maryland Bar Association simply because of his race and was prohibited by law from renting office space in the downtown business district until 1964.

So my family left for the March with great hope that these laws that interfered with their health, education and livelihoods would finally start to go away. ...