In early 2018 when I began planning for a four hundred mile walk from Selma, Alabama to Memphis, Tennessee to commemorate MLK50th, I borrowed the name Walk to Freedom, which I discuss more fully on my FAQ page, to recall and honor what was then the largest Civil Rights demonstration of its time. Frequently mistaken for the famous March On Washington, it was the 1963 Detroit Walk to Freedom which drew over a 125,000 people onto the streets of Detroit to demand “Jobs, Justice and Peace.”
Yesterday, residents from across the Detroit area commemorated the 60th anniversary of the famous Woodward Avenue walk that featured a young Martin L. King, Jr., who delivered an early version of what would later be remembered as his “I Have A Dream” speech. Jamon Jordan, the City of Detroit’s official historian, writes a beautiful historical acknowledgment of the event in the Detroit Free Press titled, “Unsung Heros: 2 Martin Luther King Jr. marches possible,” about how the Walk to Freedom march developed.
As part of the Walk to Freedom commemoration, Detroit Public Television featured a series of interviews with historians, and attendees, who remember the march. Here are two of the interviews from Detroit 1 public television.