“ We Have a Dream”: A Feminist Ecological Telling of the 1963 March on Washington

This essay recovers Black women’s contributions to the 1963 March on Washington. Through a feminist ecological telling of the event, I first examine the many genres that comprised the march and the intersectional exclusions that created different types of access for women. Women such as Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson performed musical leadership, yet women were barred from speaking as visionaries and equal partners in the movement. The next analytical move is to study how women spoke back to this exclusionary ecology and the expansive vision of Black freedom they crafted through their advocacy. Toward this end, I widen the bounds of the ecology to highlight Pauli Murray and Anna Arnold Hedgeman interrogating male civil rights leaders and then shifting their questions to wider audiences and new activist ends. The essay thus contributes to histories of civil rights rhetoric, genre studies, and methods of feminist historiography.