Martin Luther King as a Baby Martin Luther King Jr March

Edith Lee-Payne doesn't retrieve having her photograph taken at the March on Washington. What she does recall virtually that mean solar day, she says, is being "glad to exist continuing with people who wanted to brand things right." Rowland Scherman hide caption

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Rowland Scherman

Edith Lee-Payne doesn't remember having her photograph taken at the March on Washington. What she does remember near that mean solar day, she says, is being "glad to exist standing with people who wanted to brand things correct."

Rowland Scherman

For the month of August, Morning Edition and The Race Card Project are looking back at a seminal moment in civil rights history: the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his iconic "I Have a Dream Speech" on Aug. 28, 1963. Approximately 250,000 people descended on the nation'due south capital from all over the country for the mass demonstration.

Through The Race Card Project's six-word stories, we'll encounter some of the people who witnessed that history and hear their memories and reflections on race relations in America today.

Many images from the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom have taken on iconic status. One of them is a photo of a young blackness girl attending the march. You may have seen this picture, because it has been used in documentaries, textbooks and museum exhibits. She has curt hair with bangs and is holding a blackness and white banner. The girl is non smiling; in fact, it'due south hard to put a finger on her emotions — anger? Impatience? Sorrow?

Rowland Scherman is the freelance photographer who snapped that picture while on consignment for the U.S. Information Agency. He was taking photos and saw a girl in the front row of a crowd near where Martin Luther King Jr. made his "I Have a Dream" speech.

"And I meet some people laughing, and some people crying and some people earnest. And ... not only was she cute, but she was and so involved," Scherman says.

The girl in that picture is Edith Lee-Payne. She's from Detroit, and the mean solar day of the March was her 12th birthday. For decades, she had no thought that she'd become a poster child for the ceremonious rights motility. But in October 2008, her cousin spotted the motion picture on the back of a black history calendar.

"And she phoned to tell me, and I didn't believe her," Lee-Payne says. "Because also on the forepart cover, equally well every bit the back, were pictures of Frederick Douglass, Dr. Martin Luther King, Sojourner Truth, Jesse Owens and a number of other very well-known people. So why would my confront be with theirs?"

And then, Lee-Payne looked it up online.

"And so I immediately went to my reckoner, pulled it upwards, and lo and behold, there was this agenda paradigm of the front and back comprehend of the agenda with my face on it."

Lee-Payne still has the black and white banner she's belongings in the picture. In the top left corner it says, "I was there."

An "Enlightening" Experience

The famous photo provides eternal proof that she was indeed at the March on Washington. The film now lives at the National Archives. Lee-Payne has her own copy, personally signed past the photographer. Even without that photographic testament, the day is seared into her memory.

"It was of import for my mother to be at that place," Lee-Payne says. "And beingness her one and only child, it was important for me to be there with her."

Lee-Payne'south family arrived at the National Mall early on Aug. 28. Her namesake, her Aunt Edith, was volunteering at the Ruddy Cantankerous tent and had to bank check in well ahead of the crowds, which helps explain why she had such a choice spot toward the forepart.

Lee-Payne's mother had in one case worked as an entertainer and knew a lot of people in evidence business. She was a dancer who opened for Cab Calloway, and she sometimes infant-sat for Sammy Davis Jr. when he was just a child star. Lee-Payne and her female parent's vantage signal virtually the entry to the phase allowed her mom to catch up with one-time friends, Lee-Payne says.

"Lena Horne came over where nosotros were standing to talk to my mother, and in listening to them [it] was my starting time experience in learning some of the things that my mother had been subjected to," Lee-Payne recalls. "Having to enter hotels through the dorsum door, in things that they saw, in driving in a bus or on a railroad train going from one state or metropolis to the other. Those were things that my female parent had never shared with me."

She had talked about being an entertainer, Lee-Payne says, but non well-nigh the hardship of being a black entertainer. Horne and Lee-Payne's mother didn't talk for a very long fourth dimension, Lee-Payne says, "but they talked nearly the purpose for beingness there and what it meant to them, so in sharing those things, it was enlightening to me."

When Lee-Payne heard King talk virtually his dream for America, she indeed felt that her life embodied some of what he envisioned.

"I already lived that. I was able to go to integrated schools. When I was 5, vi, vii years sometime, my next-door neighbors were white. Whenever we got on the double-decker, there was never any issue about where we sat," Lee-Payne says. "We would often consume out and sit at lunch counters served past black and white waitresses. At that place were never any incidents. Being at that march, I guess I was kind of glad to exist continuing with people that wanted to make things correct."

Looking For Leadership To "Move Usa Forward"

Merely as Lee-Payne moved into adulthood, she says, that dream felt like it started to disintegrate. She did well in schoolhouse and studied business administration. But, she says, when she went searching for piece of work equally a secretary, the content of her resume was overshadowed past the color of her skin.

"I was denied employment at least 50 times, just — only — because I was black. As before long every bit I'd walk through the door, and the employer would meet me, I would be told that the task had already been filled, or I probably wouldn't like the chore anyway, or they demand to reschedule something," Lee-Payne says. "And information technology was but obvious in the few people that I could see in the office. ... And I never saw African-American women in those positions."

Lee-Payne eventually constitute work at Eastman Kodak. Over the years she has also worked every bit a civic activist, mainly in Detroit.

The exasperation captured in that photograph of a immature Edith Lee-Payne, then Edith Lee, all the same hovers over her heart — made clear when asked to share her thoughts on race relations in America today. Her six words for The Race Carte du jour Project: "Marches, jobs, freedom and justice? Not."

"Instead of seeing the equality and the justice and the freedom and jobs that we should really have l years after, it's not at that place in a lot of places — I can't say everywhere," Lee-Payne says. "What we don't have at present that nosotros had then, is the kind of leadership to kind of bring it together, to kind of help move us forward."

Lee-Payne is withal working toward change. Her to-do list is yet long, and then this Aug. 28, she will once again spend her altogether in Washington at the Lincoln Memorial. "There'due south no identify that I could exist, other than at that place," she says. "It's besides personal for me."

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Source: https://www.npr.org/2013/08/21/213804335/at-1963-march-a-face-in-the-crowd-became-a-poster-child

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