How Bright the Path Grows: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the March on Washington Large type / Large print Edition

Decades before Martin Luther King Jr. mesmerized the world with his reveries, there was meant to be a first march. The plan was announced on January 2, 1941, months ahead of the scheduled march date of July 1. King was only twelve years old then. His hometown of Atlanta was hundreds of miles away from where union champion A. Philip Randolph, head of the highly respected Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in New York City, first dreamed of sending 100,000 American Negroes to Washington, D.C.’s Pennsylvania Avenue to converge upon the nation’s capital. Their cause would be to demand equal access to “jobs in national defense,” and to “abolish discrimination in [the] defense industry and armed services.”

A. Philip Randolph—­or just Phil, among his friends—­had been galvanized by the nation’s hurried preparations to enter World War II. Things were about to change on a global scale. In 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt committed American capital to the fight abroad, allocating millions of dollars to upgrade domestic military bases and calling upon industry to manufacture myriad goods for the enlisted, and soon-­to-­be-­drafted, fighters. The war effort had infused life into the once anemic economy—­though mostly for white workers. Precious little of this windfall had graced Black America, which was still sinking under the weight of unemployment from the Great Depression and was shut out of the racially discriminatory relief programs that offered services and job opportunities during the New Deal era.

According to the labor historian William P. Jones, of the 100,000 Americans “employed in aircraft plants in 1940,” Black workers represented just 0.3 percent. Job discrimination and prohibitions against hiring Black workers were rampant across every part of the war stage, from the union halls and munitions factories that supplied the effort to the front lines in Europe and the Pacific. Phil and his associates knew all too well what these wartime gains could mean for Black laborers and their American dreams. It meant owning a house, and making enough money for their wives to stay home and maintain it, instead of working to keep the family afloat. It meant a full education for their children, who often dropped out of school to do the same. A new economy was on the horizon. Black folk just needed some wind in their sails to get there.

Phil believed a sea of Negro people gathered outside Roosevelt’s front lawn to air their grievances might make it happen. By the time news of the march plans made it to the president’s offices, Phil had gained considerable support and traction. The group even had the gall to ask Roo­se­velt’s own wife, First Lady Eleanor, and some of his advisers to speak at their protest. Negro people had taken to protest across the country before; in 1922, an estimated five thousand people revived an idea from New York City in 1917, and they walked quietly past the Capitol and White House in a silent parade to oppose lynching. But wartime was different. The nation needed to project an image of unity, if not superiority, as a peacemaker in the larger world at war. And a Negro march for basic civil rights risked revealing just how much the United States had in common with some of its sworn, fascist enemies.

As the possibility of the march grew more concrete, President Roo­se­velt issued an invitation to Phil. It was time for the men to talk. The two had met twice before. In the spring of 1938, while representing the National Negro Congress, Phil and other Black leaders spoke to the president about racial and economic inequality. But little came of it. And in the fall of 1940, Phil and Walter White, his friend from the NAACP, tried to talk Roosevelt into integrating the army. Phil and Walter had collected a bevy of horror stories: Black soldiers being beaten in uniform, or sent to army bases in towns run by the Ku Klux Klan. The disrespect that Black soldiers had to stomach while protecting the country was unconscionable. Phil pleaded for the president to issue some kind of statement and recognize Black sacrifice: “They feel that . . . they’re not wanted in the various armed forces of the country, and they feel they have earned the right to participate in every phase of the government by virtue of their record in past wars for the nation. . . . And they’re feeling that they’re being shunted aside, that they’re being discriminated against, and that they’re not wanted now.” But again, little changed.

When Phil appeared at the White House on June 18, he was hoping a third attempt might charm if not scare Roosevelt into finally taking action. It was only weeks before protesters were set to descend on the District of Columbia, and Phil wasn’t sure he could trust any promises the president made to keep them at bay. It was really the First Lady, after all, who had urged the meeting. Phil and his march colleagues made a case for military desegregation once again, but to no avail. The three-­term president was willing to budge on something less politically risky: opening up avenues to federal employment for Black workers. This move demonstrated that the president was willing to do something, but the sensitive issue of desegregating an expanding military labor force remained untouched. One of the key arguments against desegregating the armed forces was that it would hurt morale, white morale, to be clear. Roosevelt promised to bypass Congress and those obstructionist, racist southern Democrats with an executive order to make it happen. But, of course, there was a catch: Phil had to halt the march. A dedicated labor man, Phil knew how to negotiate. The compromise served some if not all of the march’s intent. And the movement would persist, carried by each and every Negro who had attended mass meetings and fundraised and spread the word. One small victory couldn’t extinguish that fire.

On June 25, 1941, the president signed Executive Order 8802, barring racial discrimination in the defense industry and ostensibly protecting Black workers—­mostly men—­from Jim Crow on the assembly lines, in union halls, and among the hiring bureaus of the nation’s federal offices. “There is evidence,” the order stated somewhat coyly, “that available and needed workers have been barred from employment in industries engaged in defense production solely because of consideration of race.” Such discrimination was dangerous in a time of war. And it was “to the detriment of workers’ morale and of national unity.” Over the next four years, “morale” and “unity” would become the watchwords of the nation as the war effort consumed every aspect of American life. Meanwhile, Black America tried to make the case that there was a moral imperative to end racist policies and practices across the United States. From Phil’s vantage point, the march had been not so much canceled as put on pause. His dream would have to live on, for now, on paper—­in the memos, the pamphlets with notes scrawled across the photographs, all tucked away in file folders as evidence of a historic day that almost was—­and in the hearts of those who had toiled alongside him. Planning the first march had connected Phil to some of the savviest political organizers across the country, from Los Angeles to St. Louis to Chicago to New York City. Phil would go on to launch new campaigns over the decades to further codify antidiscrimination. But it was these folk, Phil’s march team, who kept the home fires alive. First among them was his friend Anna Arnold Hedgeman, a political organizer who had helped Phil bring women, and especially women of faith, into the movement. In the decades to come, Anna would remain a stalwart for Phil and the cause. She would be the ace up his sleeve, and the thorn in his side.

On the day the march mission was aborted, Anna was just weeks away from turning forty-­two years old. By 1941, she had been a member of Black New York’s political and organizing community for nearly twenty years. But the fair-­skinned and dark-­haired Anna, known for her à la mode outfits and stylish hats, which she wore cocked slightly to the side atop her head, looked like a born-­and-­bred member of Harlem’s Black elite. Though she certainly fit the bill, with her sterling education and executive experience, Anna’s comfort among New York City’s upper echelon was far from natural; it was hard-­earned.

Anna Arnold was born the day after Independence Day in 1899 to William James and Marie Ellen Arnold in Marshalltown, Iowa, a town northeast of Des Moines named after a pro-­slavery Supreme Court justice whose fortunes were secured by forced laborers—­Anna’s elders had also been enslaved—­on his properties in the South. Marie had trained in Chicago under a Shakespearean, but life on the stage was not her destiny. William was a talented performer in his own right, a tenor who had traveled with a small troupe that performed songs of the Southland, when he first met Marie. Marie knew she had to abandon her hopes of becoming an actress when she married William, an emerging Prohibition activist. Despite some fond memories of Chicago, the Arnolds didn’t want their six children growing up “on city streets.” So, after several years searching for the right Minnesota town to support William’s harness-­making business, the family settled in Anoka, a town of just five thousand and one of the oldest in the Land of 10,000 Lakes.

As a daughter of the Midwest at the turn of the century, Anna was greatly influenced by the temperaments of European immigrants and by her rather peaceful existence in the nearly all-­white Anoka. In light of what so many Black people faced in the early twentieth century—­the lynchings, the poverty, the restrictions on where you could go and what you could do—­the life that the Arnolds had created for themselves in Anoka seems downright idyllic. Yes, there was a dark side to it all. Anoka’s relative peace hinged largely on the fact that there were no other Black families in town to threaten any white resident’s ideas about who was in charge. Even still, the relative kindness of her German, Norwegian, Irish, and Swedish neighbors meant Anna could have believed her country was one in which everyone was treated equally.

But Anna’s idealism was painfully corrected one day by a three-­year-­old white girl named Isabel, who wielded a child’s special brand of cruel and oblivious candor. “Anna, are you really a nigger?” Isabel asked her, likely due to some confusion over Anna’s light skin and what was likely said about her around town. In her memoir, Anna would write about this moment as her initiation into race consciousness—­and self-­consciousness. It affixed itself to her heart and mind for a lifetime. Young Anna knew enough to recognize the slur, but she wasn’t quite sure why such a small child would use it to ask her a question. In that moment, Anna “discovered the impact of my color.” Isabel might not have realized how sharp the word “nigger” could cut, the weight it carried. But the damage to Anna had been done, instantly and irrevocably. When a bewildered Anna reported the incident to her mother, Marie explained that people are sometimes referred to in “unkind fashion.” The solution, she insisted, was to “forgive . . . and then forget about it.” Reconciliation might have come easy to Marie, a woman born into a Methodist family whose patriarch was downright puritanical. But Anna could not, and would not, forget. “This was the first time a child ever rejected me,” Anna wrote in her memoir more than half a century after the exchange, “and the scar remains until this day.”

Most of Anna’s Anoka memories, which included “living in an old country house with twelve to thirteen rooms,” were markedly different from her run-­in with Isabel. In an era of school segregation, the Arnold children were permitted to attend Anoka schools with white children, and Anna proved herself to be a star student all through elementary and high schools. The Arnolds were respected members of the community, after all. And like so many members of the Black elite, from coast to coast, they often relied on the lightness of their skin tone to sidestep the color line. Anna described her father as white passing: “His lightness of skin gave him an advantage in his initial contacts.” William never fully committed himself to passing as white, which would have required him to sever some family ties and perhaps create a new identity altogether. But William was discreet in disclosing his race. When asked, he would discuss his “origin freely.” But as Anna recalled, this only ever happened “when the occasion demanded.” Anna never reported making an effort to pass for white, either. But she took great interest in understanding the variations in her family’s color and phenotype. She knew enough about history to recognize where certain features likely came from—­that enslavers had assaulted Black women with impunity, and some distant ancestor in her family was likely a product of one such attack. Even when the wretched institution of slavery had ended, the prevailing racial order valued even the slightest glimmer of whiteness. Anna wasn’t immune to this worldview. She prized the looks of her siblings, who seemed to even more resemble their European neighbors. She described her younger sisters as prettier than her: Blanche was blue-­eyed with “golden hair and an attractive blue vein on her cheek.” Grace had “long black silk curls.” Meanwhile, Anna described herself as “plain and a bit solemn.”

For Anna’s incredibly strict parents, a solemn-­looking daughter was something to celebrate. They were clear on the rules of the household: no listening to secular music, no dancing, and no courting without the parents’ sanction. The Arnold daughters were expected to focus on God, family, and school with no deviations or distractions. Growing up too far from bustling Minneapolis and St. Paul, Anna rarely had occasion to meet other Black Minnesotans outside her family, so the threat of the Arnold girls being unduly influenced by young love was low. An interracial relationship never even crossed the Arnolds’ minds, because the legal and social barriers to love across the color line were made clear to their girls.