The late Vernon Dobson approached the March with a sense of foreboding. In an interview with Barbara Mills, author of Got My Mind Set On Freedom, he said:
“We stayed up all night making sure we had people, worried that we had over-estimated what we going to do… knowing that if we didn’t do a big thing, the whole movement might be in default. We went to Lafayette Park (in West Baltimore) that morning: buses would pull up and they would fill up. And then another would fill up.”
Dobson, pastor of Union Baptist Church, was stunned. Turnout was beyond anyone’s hopes. The March seemed to have been chosen by many for a moment to be involved in one of the great movements in American history.
“It was just amazing. It almost made you teary eyed the whole day, you just couldn’t help but thank God… they had predicted there were going to be riots and at times we felt like it. We were all revolutionaries in our souls at that time. We hadn’t done enough.”
Baltimore Mayor Theodore McKeldin, one of the first white political leaders in the nation to endorse the civil rights movement, showed up at one of the points from which buses headed for Washington:
“We cannot hide,” he said, according to The Baltimore Sun. “Even if we wished to do so, the shame we feel before the Almighty and the other nations of the world as a result of the inhumanity which has deprived some of God’s children of their rights. But we can take justifiable pride in the fact that in our land, the right of the citizens to petition their government is sacred, still available, and I would like to predict, still effective.”
Whether government would respond to the movement with dispatch or not, some of the American people had been acting on their own. Even as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was speaking on the grand mall in Washington, D.C., the long-segregated Gwynn Oak Park in Baltimore County gave in to mounting pressure and dropped its long-standing, whites-only policy. A white woman asked Charles Langley, a 28-year-old black man if he would watch her son for a moment. The child climbed onto one of the painted ponies next to Langley’s daughter, Sharon. For the times it was an almost unimaginable scene –but one that McKeldin and King – and others – had hoped to see for years.
Vernon Dobson was in Washington by then listening to King speak of a day when boys and girls in these United States would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
C. Fraser Smith, author of Here Lies Jim Crow: Civil Rights in Maryland