Nobody Turn Me Around: A People's History of the 1963 March on Washington »

Charles Euchner is the author or editor of eight books. He teaches writing at Yale University and was the founding executive director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston at Harvard University. He lives in Hamden, Connecticut.

History books record August 28, 1963, as the day when over a quarter-million people rallied in Washington, in the first-ever nationally televised demonstration—when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his iconic "I Have a Dream" oration. But as Charles Euchner reveals in Nobody Turn Me Around, the march’s significance is more surprising and complex than standard treatments allow.

With rich oral histories from over one hundred participants—high-profile civil rights leaders but also ordinary Americans, like the marcher who won a train ticket after enduring a brutal jailing—Euchner offers a vivid tale of that day. Nobody Turn Me Around shows the movement at its apex, on the verge of achieving historic reform—and decline. The book shows James Farmer watching the march from his jail cell; Malcolm X’s secret vow to help the march, while mocking it from the sidelines; how King really wrote his landmark address; the controversy over John Lewis’s damning speech; and devastating undercurrents involving JFK and J. Edgar Hoover. Each scene comes alive in this richly intimate account of the peak of the civil rights era.

Publishers Weekly

On August 28, 1963, a quarter of a million people converged on the nation’s capital for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Martin Luther King, whose “I Have a Dream” speech highlighted the occasion, called it “the greatest demonstration for freedom in the nation’s history.” Yale writing instructor Euchner (The Last Nine Innings) presents “a pointillist portrait” of the occasion, drawing material from historical records and taking oral histories from more than 100 participants. Although 1963 was the 100th anniversary of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, racial segregation remained deeply entrenched in the nation’s South, and one specific, practical goal of the march was to desegregate restaurants and hotels. The Kennedy administration mobilized extensive military and police resources, but march leaders, including principal organizer Bayard Rustin and longtime civil rights activist Asa Philip Randolph, were confident (and accurate) in their belief that a peaceful mass demonstration of this scale was not only possible but could change the course of race relations in America. With deft brushstrokes, Euchner not only captures the myriad dimensions of the march itself but places it in its larger historical context, including the escalating war in Vietnam. (Aug.)