March forth

That’s me with writers from my Wednesday class at a party a few years back.

Last week my Wednesday memoir-writing class met on March 4th, the only day of the year that is a command. Our writing prompt? March Forth, of course.

Writers came back with stories of lining up and marching into school when they were kids, marching in parades, marching to the beat of a different drummer, and even the march of time. One of the more poignant pieces was written by a writer who took a bus to Washington, D.C. in August, 1963 for Martin Luther King’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. “All I carried with me was my purse, some food, water, a notebook and my father’s old 8mm film camera, plus a few rolls of film tucked into the bottom of an old leather carrying case,” Sandy wrote. “I was excited to be on an evening bus heading towards our nation’s capitol, a place I had read about so often but never visited.” Here’s an excerpt from Sandy’s piece, describing what she saw as she “marched forth” from the bus station to the Washington Mall:

There were families of all races, elderly people who looked tired but happy to be there, people from cities, farmers from fields, hippies from Haight-Asbury contrasted by straight-laced corporate and government workers. Everyone came together. The sounds of English mixed together with different languages filled the air. Crowds multiplied as they gathered on the Washington Mall, squeezed so close to each other that they looked like patchwork pieces tightly sewn together into a colorful quilt.

Sandy read her essay out loud in class on the very day the Justice Department issued findings that accuse the police department in Ferguson, Missouri of racial bias and routinely violating the constitutional rights of black citizens. We talked about this while discussing Sandy’s essay, how 50 years after that march in 1963, things still aren’t right. . Wanda — a beloved 93-year-old African-American writer in our class — was uncharacteristically quiet during the discussion. The only time she chimed in was after someone pointed out that the Justice Department had 35,000 pages of records to prove its case. “It took them 35,00 pages to find out what we’ve known our entire lives,” she said.