Martin Luther King was walking a tightrope. He knew that Kennedy was reluctant to get involved in the civil rights minefield, because of the political risks. It was risky, and it bordered on political suicide. He pushed and shoved Kennedy to put pressure on him to issue an executive order ending segregation (second Emancipation Proclamation). Kennedy decided to press the Congress for legislation, even though it faced a certain filibuster in the Senate. MLK wanted to push Kennedy hard enough to get him to take action (use the power of the federal government to end segregation), but not so hard as to alienate him and make him an enemy. MLK viewed Kennedy as a potential (but reluctant and timid) ally. So he wanted to push, but not too hard. This is difficult to do: enough pressure but not too much pressure. JFK did need to be pushed, but by June 11 he realized the need and the urgency and publicly commited himself to the cause of a civil rights bill. By June 11 JFK "saw the light." He needed to be pushed in order to get to that point, but once there he was courageous in taking the necessary risks. A more cowardly president simply would not have taken the political risks that JFK eventually took. In asking Congress for a law to end segregation, Kennedy did more than any president since Lincoln and Grant, and was returning to the same ground as Senator Charles Sumner of Mass. (Civil Rights Act of 1875).

Among the speakers at the March on washington were Catholic Archbishop Patrick O'Boyle of Washington DC, Protestant Reverend Eugene Carson Blake of the National Council of Chruches, and Rabbi Joachim Prinz of the American Jewish Congress. Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers spoke, and John Lewis of SNCC and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP. James Farmer of CORE was in jail, so his message was read. No women spoke, although Rosa Parks, Daisy Bates, Diane Nash Bevel, Gloria Richardson and widow Mrs. Herbert Lee were introduced and received applause. Mehalia Jackson sang.
 

The media have distorted the image of MLK by giving us an incomplete picture, and selectively omitting or editing out the parts that do not "fit" the image the media want to present.

In the full text of his speech, MLK said that "one hundred years later [after the Emancipation Proclamation] we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later , the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition.

In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. 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."

Later on, King said "There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, 'When will you be satisfied?' We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream."

He adds "I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality."

From there he goes on to talk about his dream of the society in which people will be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin, and his closing coda to let freedom ring.

Most treatments of the speech ignore the bad check marked insufficient funds, and King's assertion that 100 years after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation Afro-Americans still were not free. The mainstream wanted to believe that black people were "freed" by the 13th Amendment of 1865, that ended slavery. This narrow conception defines freedom as the mere absence of the institution of slavery. But King's point was that in 1963 Afro-Americans still were not free from segregation or discrimination or ghettoization or police brutality.

One might add that the Confiscation Act of 1862 had promised Afro-Americans 40 acres of land from the "abandoned and confiscated lands" of the South. The vast majority of freed slaves never received those 40 acres. That promise too had been broken, and had come back marked "insufficient funds."

The media delighted in King's dream of the future. This did not require that the past debt be attended to, or paid, and it did not require that America pay attention to King's indictment of the past and the present.

Following the great march Kennedy met with King and some of the other civil rights leaders.

On September 10^th (or thereabout ) the House Ways and Means Committee, chaired by Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, voted to approve Kennedy's tax cut proposal. It then went to the full House for a vote, and from there would eventually go to the Senate. JFK deliberately waited until after the tax cut bill had safely passed the committee before asking the Congress to begin hearings on the proposed civil rights bill. The House had taken little or no action on the bill when Kennedy died in November 1963.

Kennedy was afraid that the Republicans were "setting him up" politically. His fear was that the Republicans would push for the public accommodations provision, knowing full well that it would die in the Senate, and then the Democrats would be divided (liberal North versus segregationist South) and the Democrats would get the blame for the failure. The Afro-Americans would then be angry with the president and the Democrats. This disarray would benefit the Republicans. Opponents of the civil rights bill conspired to strengthen the bill in order to sabotage it: in the end it would be so sweeping that people would oppose it as too strong (thus efforts to strengthen the bill might end up becoming a poison pill).

MLK feared that the administration would pretend to put up a fight, and in the end it would compromise on the bill; and the final version would be watered down and diluted; and the administration would blame the defeat of the public accommodations section on the South--rather than fight as hard as possible to get the strongest bill that was possible. The civil rights bill faced a treacherous road ahead in the Congress, and many sides were suspicious and mistrustful and afraid of being betrayed.