Texas Archive of the Moving Image
Some marchers in Austin wore their concerns on banners.
Monday marks the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which included one of American history’s greatest oratories.
The march and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech in front of more than 200,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial struck a chord in the conscience of American society on an issue whose time had come.
Another march occurred that same day in a hot and steamy Austin in harmony with the events taking place in Washington, D.C. It was organized by Dr. Marion J. Brooks of Fort Worth and W.J. Durham, a Dallas lawyer for the NAACP and vice president of the Texas Council of Voters.
“The purpose of the march was to be in solidarity with the march on Washington but also to take the fight for equal rights for the governor's mansion and to try to convince Gov. Connally to sign legislation, guaranteeing all Texans equal rights under the law. Which at that time meant mostly public accommodations,” says Tarrant County Commissioner Roy Charles Brooks, son of Marion Brooks.
Roy Charles Brooks was 12 that day in August and present for the march from the Doris Miller Recreation Center in east Austin to Wooldridge Square, adjacent to the Governor’s Mansion. A video of the march can be found here.
“My parents filed my sibling group of five into the family's nine passenger station wagon and drove us to Austin,” Brooks says. “My mother had spent the night before making sandwiches and frying chicken, putting together lunches, so that we could have food to sustain us as we drove to and from Austin because there was no place along the way for a Black family to stop and be served.
“That was one of the purposes of the March.”
Texas Archive of the Moving Image
As many as 1,000 marchers made their presence known on Aug. 28, 1963, in Austin.
According to reports, somewhere between 800-1,000 turned out in Austin for the march. While John F. Kennedy gave an audience to leaders of the Washington march, Connally did not do the same for the Austin leaders.
Leaders of the Austin march used the gathering place of the park as the site to address marchers and policymakers alike.
Said the Rev. Claude Black of San Antonio: “We came here to warn the segregationists their days are numbered.”
“My dad was one of the speakers,” Brooks recalls, “And he could harangue an audience with the best of them. And he did that day.”
Marion Brooks was born in Fort Worth on Feb. 15, 1920. He graduated from the segregated I.M. Terrell High School in 1937. Four years later, he graduated from Prairie View A&M, a historically Black university, and in 1951 he earned his medical degree from Howard University.
He and his brother Donald Brooks, the first African American surgeon in Fort Worth, opened a medical clinic.
Marion Brooks’ activism included working to integrate Fort Worth hospitals. Black patients, up to a time, were restricted to the basement of the Saint Joseph Hospital on South Main Street. Two years before the march on Austin, Brooks was the first African American named to the city's park board. He later founded the Tarrant County Precinct Council, a grassroots voting-rights caucus.
In the days leading up to JFK’s trip to Fort Worth and Dallas, Marion Brooks refused a last-minute invitation to the breakfast at the Hotel Texas on the morning of Nov. 22, believing he and his wife were merely invited for the sake of appearances.
He told an organizer that he would take 50 tickets, or “I will not be there.”
“They said to him, ‘Dr. Brooks, you don't understand, this breakfast has been sold out for weeks.’ He said, ‘I understand perfectly. We will take 50 tickets, or we won't be there.’ They found 50 tickets. Fifty African American Fort Worth leaders attended that breakfast.”
Roy Brooks says there was skepticism about Lyndon Johnson, but JFK’s successor was a statesman on the matter, pushing the most sweeping Civil Rights legislation since Reconstruction through Congress in 1964. A bill to fortify voting rights followed in 1965.
There was a countermarch that day in 1963 by a white supremacist group that called itself the Indignant White Citizens Council. It was led by a 34-year-old grocer from Grand Prairie that no one but his family remembers.
It was sparsely attended, according to news reports. The leader blamed Connally for the poorly-attended march. The governor had asked segregationists to stay away.
“As I recall it,” Brooks says, “they were a small, much less well-organized group, almost like an ad hoc group of protest. So, it just popped up. What they did not do was put a damper on the festivities of the day.”
The segregationists, not surprisingly, tried to be hurtful. They failed.
“Many spectators smiled” at the segregationists, a news report summarized. “Some shook their heads. Others showed no signs of emotion. There were no retorts or threats of violence.”