Birmingham, and the worldwide news coverage its violence received, catapulted the Southern civil rights struggle to greater national prominence than it had ever before attained. Martin Luther King, speaking to his close friend and adviser Stanley Levison on June 1 over a wiretapped phone line, told Levison, ‘We are on the threshold of a significant breakthrough and the greatest weapon is the mass demonstration.’ (J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation, believing Levison to be a secret Communist who might be manipulating King, had obtained Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s approval for the wiretapping a year earlier. The transcripts of those wiretaps were released to me, pursuant to the federal Freedom of Information Act, in the mid-1980s.) Because of Birmingham, King told Levison, ‘We are at the point where we can mobilize all of this righteous indignation into a powerful mass movement’ that could pressure the Kennedy administration to finally take decisive action on behalf of black civil rights.

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More specifically, King told Levison that they should publicly announce a ‘march on Washington,’ for ‘the threat itself may so frighten the President that he would have to do something.’ Given the standoffish attitude that the Kennedy brothers had manifested toward King and the movement from January 1961 up through May 1963, neither King nor his colleagues had any expectation whatsoever that the Kennedys would change their stance absent widespread objections.

King’s hope was that the president could unilaterally issue an executive order nullifying segregation, and a week after his wiretapped conversation about a march King went public, saying that such an event could feature’sit-in’ protests at the U.S. Capitol. ‘Dr. King Denounces President on Rights’ was The New York Times headline on the resulting news story.

But neither King nor the press knew that privately, for more than two weeks, the president, his attorney general brother and their closest civil rights advisers had been secretly putting together an outline for a dramatically far-reaching civil rights bill that the administration would place before Congress. On the evening of June 11, John F. Kennedy went on nationwide television to announce that proposal and to tell the American people that the civil rights struggle confronted them ‘primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.’

Kennedy’s remarkable address deeply impressed King. ‘He was really great,’ King told Levison in yet another wiretapped phone call. Most immediately, King added, Kennedy’s speech meant that their March on Washington now ought to target Congress, not the president. King publicly amplified that thought a week later in Birmingham: ‘As soon as they start to filibuster, I think we should march on Washington with a quarter of a million people.’

But two important entities were unpersuaded of the political wisdom of any such march. One was the two mainline civil rights groups that previously had rebuffed Randolph, the NAACP and the NUL. The other was the Kennedy administration, which quickly invited King, Randolph, Young and other civil rights leaders to a private meeting with the president on June 22. ‘We want success in Congress, not just a big show at the Capitol,’ John Kennedy told them. ‘It seemed to me a great mistake to announce a march on Washington before the bill was even in committee. The only effect is to create an atmosphere of intimidation — and this may give some members of Congress an out.’

A. Philip Randolph tried to rebut the president’s worries, but Kennedy was adamant, saying, ‘To get the votes we need, we have, first, to oppose demonstrations which will lead to violence, and, second, give Congress a fair chance to work its will.’ The president did not explicitly ask for cancellation of the March, but his message was clear. King told reporters that ‘we feel a demonstration would help the President’s civil rights legislation’ rather than hurt it, but NAACP leader Roy Wilkins was noncommittal, and in private he told his colleagues that only ‘quiet, patient lobbying tactics’ should be employed.

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