John Lewis was the youngest speaker at the 1963 March on Washington—where MLK gave the "I have a dream" speech—and the speech Lewis wrote that day was so incendiary that the march organizers wouldn't let him deliver it as written.
On the day before the march, the Catholic archbishop of Washington DC, who was scheduled to give the opening invocation, received a copy of John Lewis’ speech. He freaked out.
Arguments over Lewis' speech continued during the march itself—even while speakers were addressing the crowd from the Lincoln Memorial, Lewis was huddled in a guard station inside, by the Abraham Lincoln statue, with Dr. King, A. Philip Randolph, and others, negotiating changes.
Lewis was 23 at the time, by the way. King was 34. A. Phillip Randolph was 73.
In the end, the group negotiated more than a dozen significant changes to the speech, each of which moderated its tone and substance and many of which have particular resonance today. The final typed version was completed just moments before Lewis took the stage.
So what did they change? I'm glad you asked.
The first problem came in the speech's second sentence, where Lewis said the movement couldn't fully support JFK's civil rights bill, because it was "too little, too late." That got changed to "we support it with great reservation."
Why didn't Lewis support the civil rights act "wholeheartedly"? Well, this line, appearing immediately after the one above, gives an indication: "There’s not one thing in the bill that will protect our people from police brutality." That line was struck entirely.
And right after that, a line referring to the bill's failure to "protect young children and old women from police dogs and fire hoses" had the words "in the South" added to it.
(On several occasions, including right around here, references were added to the bill "in its present form"—not entirely unreasonably. The bill wasn't finished, and it was seen as more productive to push for improvements rather than reject it as inadequate.)
Next, Lewis had written that the Kennedy civil rights bill ("in its present form" in the final version) would not "protect the citizens of Danville, Virginia, who must live in constant fear in a police state."
Danville had been the site of ongoing civil rights demonstrations and boycotts that spring and summer, and the city government had reacted brutally—beating protesters, many of them high school students, using fire hoses on them, cramming them into overcrowded jails.
Lewis' elders had him change "the citizens of Danville, Virginia, who must live in constant fear in a police state" to "...must live in constant fear OF a police state."
Of all the changes Lewis had foisted on him that day, that one is maybe the most fascinating to me. "In a police state" is an emphatic statement about lived conditions, explicitly naming what it meant, what it was, to be Black in the Jim Crow South.
"Of," on the other hand, is both tempered and ambiguous—the fear of a police state is a fear of something external, and maybe even hypothetical. A tiny change, but one that carries incredible weight.
Next, Lewis went on to condemn the bill for not including voting rights protections. "As it stands now," his elders added, but that wouldn't be changed before the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. Voting would have to wait for the Voting Rights Act the following year.
(A great line that Lewis' handlers didn't change: "'One man, one vote!' is the African cry. It is ours, too. It must be ours.")
I would give a hell of a lot to have been a fly on the wall for any of the discussions between Lewis, King, and Randolph about the speech, but for the next big change more than (maybe) any other:
Lewis had written that "For the first time in one hundred years this nation is being awakened to the fact that segregation is evil and that it must be destroyed in all forms. Your presence today proves that you have been aroused to the point of action."
They had him take that whole paragraph out.
Imagine. You're John Lewis. You're 23. You've written that the nation is being awakened to the evils of segregation "for the first time in one hundred years." And then A. Philip Randolph puts his hand on your shoulder and looks you in the eye.
I mean. 
In the next paragraph, Lewis had written that "this nation is still a place of cheap political leaders who build their careers on immoral compromise and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic and social exploitation."
They had him change that to "by and large, American politics is dominated by politicians who build their careers on immoral compromise [etc.]" and then add "There are exceptions, of course. We salute those."
(I feel a little bad only concentrating on the changes here—the speech itself is amazing, even as delivered, and some of the stuff that stayed in is bracing even today. Full links to everything coming at the end of the thread.)
That said, however, the next long passage to be excised in its entirety was fire:
"I want to know, which side is the federal government on? The revolution is at hand, and we must free ourselves of the chains of political and economic slavery."
(Damn.)
"The nonviolent revolution is saying, 'We will not wait for the courts to act, for we have been waiting for hundreds of years.'"
"We will not wait for the President, the Justice Department, nor Congress, but we will take matters into our own hands and create a source of power, outside of any national structure, that could and would assure us a victory."
More rhetorical trimming: "To those who have said, 'Be patient and wait,' we must say that 'patience' is a dirty and nasty word. We must say that we cannot be patient," changed to "To those who have said, 'Be patient and wait,' we have long said that we cannot be patient."
Another long passage cut in its entirety:
"We cannot depend on any political party, for both the Democrats and the Republicans have betrayed the basic principles of the Declaration of Independence."
"We all recognize the fact that if any radical social, political and economic changes are to take place in our society, the people, the masses, must bring them about."
"The revolution is a serious one. Mr. Kennedy is trying to take the revolution out of the streets and put it into the courts."
"Listen, Mr. Kennedy. Listen, Mr. Congressman. Listen, fellow citizens. The black masses are on the march for jobs and freedom, and we must say to the politicians that there won’t be a 'cooling-off' period."
You can see why the bishop freaked out.
The excised reference to "revolution" above was the launching point for the speech's peroration, the final passage in which he laid out his vision for that revolution and its goals. As you can imagine, the editors' pens are much in evidence here.
Lewis began the final passage by saying "All of us must get in the revolution." That got changed to "I appeal to all of you to get into this great revolution that is sweeping this nation."
The next sentence was preserved almost intact, with the addition of just two words tucked in near the end—two small words that, like the in/of substitution above, transformed the entire sentence—indeed, the entire speech.
Lewis had written: "Get in and stay in the streets of every city, every village and every hamlet of this nation until true freedom comes, until the revolution is complete."
As delivered, it was changed to: "Get in and stay in the streets of every city, every village and every hamlet of this nation until true freedom comes, until the revolution of 1776 is complete."
(cc: @nhannahjones, @Lin_Manuel)
Another substitution in the following sentence made a similar attempt to recast Lewis' radical activist vision of grassroots revolt as something more palatable, less open-ended, less apocalyptic.
"In the Delta of Mississippi, in southwest Georgia, in Alabama, Harlem, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and all over this nation," Lewis had written, "the black masses are on the march!"
In the speech as delivered, that line read: "In the Delta of Mississippi, in southwest Georgia, in Alabama, Harlem, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and all over this nation, the black masses are on a march for jobs and freedom."
And by now, you should be able to figure out what clause his elders added to this line, a few sentences later:
"All of the forces of Eastland, Barnett, Wallace and Thurmond will not stop this revolution. If we do not get meaningful legislation out of this Congress, the time will come when we will not confine our marching to Washington."
(Yep, it's "if we do not get meaningful legislation out of this Congress.")
It's the sentence after this one, though, that still makes me gasp 57 years later—at its audacity, at its anger, at its bravery.
From Gabriel Prosser to Nat Turner to John Brown, the white South had long lived in enraged fear of retaliatory, insurrectionist revolt against white supremacy. Throughout the original draft of his speech, Lewis had been courting such fear and anger almost tauntingly.
With his next sentence the "almost" disappeared.
"We will march through the South," Lewis wrote, "through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We shall pursue our own 'scorched earth' policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground—nonviolently."
If you're not familiar with Sherman's march, Google it. In short, it refers to Union general William Tecumseh Sherman's late-1864 campaign through Georgia, from Atlanta to coastal Savannah, cutting a swath of fire and destruction through the heart of the South.
General Sherman intentionally targeted civilian infrastructure on his march to the sea, with the intent of depriving the Confederacy of not just the capacity to resist, but the will to do so. His name remains anathema in certain quarters of the white South to this day.
For a 23-year-old black civil rights activist—born in rural Alabama, then living in, of all places, Atlanta—to write a speech to be delivered on a national stage in which he pledged that Black folks would march like Sherman against white supremacy?
My mind boggles at the bravery.
And look at the construction of the sentence, the way he holds back the word "nonviolently" until the very end. I'd give a lot to know how he intended to deliver that line, how long he intended to pause from the podium before releasing the final word.
"We will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We shall pursue our own 'scorched earth' policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground."
"Nonviolently."
So what was that replaced with? With this:
"We will march through the South, through the streets of Jackson, through the streets of Danville, through the streets of Cambridge, through the streets of Birmingham. But we will march with the spirit of love and with the spirit of dignity that we have shown here today."
We're at the final paragraph now. The speech is nearly done.
Lewis' next line—intended, remember, to immediately follow the Sherman passage—was this: "We shall fragment the South into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of democracy."
Three changes were made to this sentence. First, "We shall fragment" was changed to "By the forces of our demands, our determination and our numbers, we shall splinter," emphasizing not just nonviolence but the role of sheer rectitude in bringing change.
Second, what was intended to be fragmented (or splintered) was changed from "the South" to "the segregated South."
And finally, to the phrase "in the image of democracy" the word "God" was added, making it "in the image of God and democracy."
The next line in the original speech was cut completely, and once again, I'd have loved to have seen the exchange that led to its excision.
Imagine King, Lewis, and the others huddling in the shadow of the monumental statue of Lincoln, behind the podium, haggling over every line. They're nearly done. They get to this:
"We will make the action of the past few months look petty."
I'm not going to presume to imagine that moment, but oh my goodness would I have loved to have seen it.
The last line of the speech, as written, kind of comes out of nowhere, and it doesn't have much to it. I suspect that how it went over would have depended largely on delivery.
This is how Lewis intended to end, immediately after the "petty" line: "And I say to you, wake up America!" That's it. That was the end.
Instead he closed with this, which bears the marks of the softening that had characterized the edits before, but also adds a final sentence that harkens back to previous lines, and focuses the underlying argument of his remarks to a single point:
"We must say, 'Wake up America, wake up!' For we cannot stop, and we will not and cannot be patient."
It's better. And if you watch the film of the speech you can see that the last line was in the written text—it wasn't improvised, it was added as part of the editing process.
If you want to watch the speech, by the way, you can see it here—it's just six minutes and forty-eight seconds long, and it's tremendous.
One thing that leaps out, as you watch, is his willing to lean into the lines that weren't his. Some of the lines he hits hardest and most emphatically are ones that were added just before he delivered the speech.
And if you want to compare the two versions of the speech—or just read it as originally written—I've got a few options for you. First, here's a site that has the two versions side-by-side, so you can read either alone, or go back and forth between the two: billmoyers.com/content/two-ve…
Second, here's a markup version of the speech I did for my blog a while back, in which the elements that were removed appear as strikethrus and the new elements are highlighted: studentactivism.net/2011/08/28/joh…
And here's a lovely piece from @gbrockell of the Washington Post (published last night, and which I hadn't seen until just now) talking about the pressures that were put on Lewis, and describing the editing process: washingtonpost.com/history/2020/0…
The image of John Lewis I carry in my head is this one, from 1961, with fellow SNCC activist Jim Zwerg after the two were beaten in Montgomery, Alabama. Bloody but unbowed.
And that's the image I carry of Lewis delivering the March on Washington speech as well. The process was wrenching and the result was far from what he would have chosen. And yet there he stands. Bloody but unbowed.
Whew. That wound up being a lot more than I'd intended. I'm going to tidy this all up a bit with an eye toward posting it on my (almost entirely dormant) blog later, so those of you who've requested access to the whole thing in a more useable format should stay tuned.
(And I guess I should say, since this is probably coming: If you're from a publication and are thinking of running this as a series of embedded tweets, please don't. That's gross. But if you'd like me to consider placing the cleaned up version with you, my DMs are open.)
Okay, here's some more. I wrote this thread pretty much off the top of my head, using my blogpost comparison of the original and final versions of the speech for guidance, but otherwise only looking up a couple of specific things.
I did not, in other words, go back to re-read the relevant chapter of John Lewis' memoir, even though it was right there on the shelf. (I wasn't expecting this to blow up the way it did, either in length or in audience.)
I've since done so, though, and (re)discovered a bunch of wonderful detail. (Happily, I didn't get anything ridiculously wrong in the thread above.) So here we go.
I didn't concentrate on the drafting of the original version of the speech in the thread, but that was a collaborative process as well. Lewis was representing SNCC at the March, and he had help from a bunch of SNCC folks in drafting the speech.
In his memoir, he credits Joyce Ladner, Courtland Cox, and "a young law student named Eleanor Holmes," among others, with working with him on it. (Eleanor Holmes is of course now @EleanorNorton, DC's non-voting representative in Congress.)
Lewis credits an activist named Tom Kahn with coming up with the Sherman's march line—Kahn, 24 at the time, was a gay Jewish student at Howard University, an ally of Stokely Carmichael, and Bayard Rustin's ex-boyfriend.
(Kahn went on to a long career in socialist and labor organizing before dying of AIDS in 1992.)
It wasn't just the Catholic Church that was mad about the speech, by the way. The archbishop had made some calls to the White House, and both Bobby Kennedy and Burke Marshall were breathing down the organizers' necks about it.
Given that Bobby Kennedy was both the president's brother and the attorney general, and that Burke Marshall was the head of the civil rights division at the Justice Department, this was a not-small problem.
Of the March leadership, Roy Wilkins was particularly pissed off at Lewis, and several in SNCC pushed back hard. The small-group meeting—with Lewis, King, Randolph and a rep from the National Council of Churches—was intended to get the hotter heads on both sides out of the way.
After the Lewis/King/Randolph meeting, and while the speeches from the podium were underway, the group got bigger again, and tempers got hotter. Ultimately, in Lewis' telling, Randolph stepped in and made a personal plea.
Randolph told Lewis that he'd been planning the March since 1941 (which he had), and asked him, "please don't ruin it." "We've come this far together. Let's stay together."
As Lewis put it in his memoir, saying no to such a personal, plaintive request from A. Philip Randolph was impossible.
So he gathered up all the notes from the previous meeting, sat James Forman of SNCC down at a typewriter, and the two of them—Lewis and Forman—hammered out the final draft just in time for him to give the speech.
(And rereading that passage after many years, by the way, is how I learned that I have shaken the hand of the man who typed the final version of John Lewis' speech to the March on Washington.)
As for the speech itself, Lewis writes that though he felt angry about the process and about some of the changes that were imposed, he didn't believe the speech had been fundamentally compromised. It still had "bite," he wrote, "more teeth than any other speech made that day."
Which it did.
Update: A bunch of folks have said they'd love to hear someone deliver the original speech. Here, via @jimbo10610, is Danny Glover doing just that:
Another tidbit: Someone just directed me to an op-ed that Joyce Ladner, mentioned briefly earlier in the thread, wrote for the March's 40th anniversary. A great inside peek from a different perspective within SNCC. washingtonpost.com/archive/opinio…
