5 Facts about the March on Washington

This week marks the 57th anniversary of the original March on Washington. This event, held on Aug. 28, 1963, helped to pass the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965).

Here are five facts you should know about the landmark civil rights protest march.

1. The event—officially known as the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom”—was organized by the “Big Six” leaders of the civil rights movement: A. Philip Randolph, Whitney M. Young, Jr., Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., James Farmer, Roy Wilkins, and John Lewis. Bayard Rustin was chief organizer of the march. 
   
   Although the organizers disagreed about the purpose of the march, the group came together on a set of goals: passage of meaningful civil rights legislation; immediate elimination of school segregation; a program of public works, including job training, for the unemployed; a federal law prohibiting discrimination in public or private hiring; a $2-an-hour minimum wage nationwide; withholding Federal funds from programs that tolerate discrimination; enforcement of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution by reducing congressional representation from states that disenfranchise citizens; a broadened Fair Labor Standards Act to currently excluded employment areas; and authority for the Attorney General to institute injunctive suits when constitutional rights are violated.

This Week at the ERLC

• Russell Moore had two interviews about confronting international threats to human dignity with Axios and World Magazine.

• Jeff Pickering spoke at the Stop Genocide Rally about the ERLC’s advocacy to declare Burma’s atrocities against the Rohyinga people as a genocide.

• Josh Wester was interviewed by Deseret News about Christians and popular culture. 

• Jason Thacker was on Pilgrim Radio talking about ethics and the pandemic. He was also interviewed by  MIT Technology Review about Christians and conspiracy theories. And he has an article at Providence magazine about cybersecurity. 

• Chelsea Patterson Sobolik has an op-ed at the Wall Street Journal about Liberty University and its future.

What You Need to Read

• Josh Wester with 4 lessons from Carl F. H. Henry’s “The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism”

More than half a century has passed since the publication of Carl F. H. Henry’s prophetic volume, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. In only 89 pages, Henry delivered a word that shocked and challenged Christians in the post-war era. Having lived through the brutal and horrific realities of the second world war, including the Jewish Holocaust and the deployment of atomic weapons, Americans in the middle of the 20th century were facing a difficult future. And Henry knew the moment demanded a serious response from the church, one that applied the depths of the Christian message to the heart of society’s problems.

• Jason Thacker with How pornography is preying on the vulnerable in the midst of COVID-19

Amid the cultural upheaval of COVID-19 and what has turned out to be one of the most eventful years in modern history, a dehumanizing and predatory perversion of technology has been spreading in the darkness of our communities: pornography. While the out-of-sight nature of pornography makes it is easier to shrug off its insidiousness, especially given the social unrest of the moment, the rise in predatory marketing plans and expanded pornography use should not be left alone because of the monumental human dignity implications.

• Alex Ward with Explainer: Report of the Human Fetal Tissue Research Ethics Advisory Board

Though there are cases where fetal tissue can be obtained ethically, as in the case of miscarriages, there is also the danger of incentivizing the death and sale of children through fetal tissue research. Thus, it is imperative that a board such as this review proposals and ensure that a culture of death is not expanded under the banner of improving life for the rest of humanity. We cannot sacrifice the weakest for our own benefit—that is a Darwinistic outlook that sees power and might as the standard of morality and defines a child in terms of his or her usefulness, not their intrinsic worth. The work that the advisory board is doing helps to promote an ethical approach to research that defends the rights of the most vulnerable.

News From Capitol Hill

Our team in Washington is advancing a number of pro-life efforts right now, beginning with our advocacy in the annual appropriations process. 

We are tracking a range of policies throughout the multiple appropriation bills in order to protect pro-life riders like the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits tax dollars from being spent on abortion and attempts to curtail religious freedom by diluting conscience protection policies for healthhcare professionals.

As Travis Wussow commented on a recent episode of Capitol Conversations, “our appropriations advocacy is some of the most inside baseball work we do, but it really matters because the appropriations bill is one of the most significant bills that gets passed each year.”

This work is a good example of why Southern Baptists have the ERLC in Washington to work inside the federal legislative process on policies that matter. The abortion lobby pushes for their agenda within the details of policy, but so does the pro-life community, protecting life by professionally countering their arguments. You can learn more about our appropriations work here.

Other efforts underway in Washington include the ERLC’s support for Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance Policy (PLGHA) and the work of the Human Fetal Tissue Ethics Advisory Board.

Chelsea Patterson Sobolik writes about how the PLGHA policy is an effort by the Departments of State, HHS, and USAID to expand the Mexico City Policy by “ensuring that any foreign aid funding to international nongovernmental organizations agree to neither perform nor actively promote abortion as a method of family planning overseas.” You can read her explainer on this international pro-life effort here.

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