March On!™ Festival 2026 | September 29 - October 6, 2026 | Celebrating 250 Years of Democracy: The Unfinished Story
March On!™ Festival 2026 | September 29 - October 6, 2026 | Celebrating 250 Years of Democracy: The Unfinished Story
"We fly higher than the weather…”
New Orleans, Louisiana provided the thematic bassline for two festival programs. NOLA is the home of our gala honoree, Marc Morial, and his father was one of the patriarchs highlighted at our Saturday night event New Orleans National Impact: Three Families Behind a Movement.
The sons and daughter of late notables Moon Landrieu, Dutch Morial and Norm Francis followed in their fathers’ high achieving footsteps. They, with moderator Anthony Coley, reminisced about their political achievements and the supportive interplay of the men and their families.
Musical enhancement for both events was provided by DC’s Crush Funk Brass Band who brought some super spicy Nawlins’ rhythms. They marched in playing, first line style, followed by their ad hoc hype woman, our intrepid Festival Director, Leigh Davis leading a strong second line, her twirling umbrella held high.
The scene was our Friday night event, Shall We Gather? where our panelists unpacked the current dimensions of racial allyship in the justice movement.
Attorney and advocate Andrea Lopez reminded us that free labor has always been integral to this country’s economic prowess.
For all the talk of manifest destiny, free markets, and the unique advantages of American capitalism, financial success has depended on hegemony over a permanent and rotating underclass of the enslaved, indentured servants, share croppers, migrant workers, and prison or undocumented laborers. Something about hearing that, out loud, in that room, reverberated profoundly down to the bones.
"I am the daughter of freedom fighters and farmers, bootleggers and number runners..."
That reverb continued and swelled with the performances of Maimouna Youssef, aka MuMu Fresh, and movement veteran, Ms. Rutha Mae Harris. It was a melding of two generations and genres of music and activism – hop hop and spoken word with a traditional spiritual and the call and response of Civil Rights songs. We threw our heads back and sang! “Ain’t gon let nobody turn me around.” You got that right!
It was truly The People’s Mic on Sunday afternoon at the MLK Library. Several intrepid poets and performers stepped to the stage to reveal their talents and deliver original works.
But one young brother departed from that format, overcame his hesitancy and led us in a rousing acapella rendition of Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing, aka the Black National Anthem.
It was originally penned as a hymn in 1899 by NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson, and set to music composed in 1900 by his brother J. Rosamond Johnson. Stalwarts among us know all three verses, but on this occasion we got by with the rousing first verse that made my heart sing. “Facing the rising sun of a new day begun, let us march on, ‘til victory is won!”
One of the advantages – blessings, actually – of my work with the festival is the accumulation of knowledge I have garnered from years of producing the festival’s films, panels, cultural events and scholarly presentations. It hit me during the screening of the film Rosenwald, our second time featuring this rich documentary.
The film highlighted the partnership between philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, longtime owner and president of national retailing behemoth Sears Roebuck and Company with famed educator, orator and leader of Tuskegee Institute, Booker T. Washington. The relationship resulted in the building of nearly 5000 schools for Black children in the segregated rural South.
So many names and faces of people, past and present, whose lives and works we have featured over the years of the festival were among those noted in the film. These prompted mental connections with other points of history, as in the story of the porters of the Pullman Palace Car Company’s luxury railroad sleeping cars.
From our program on the Negro Motorist Green Book we learned that its author, NYC postal worker Hugo Green, got his listings on the hotels, restaurants, theaters and other establishments that were safe for Black travelers from porters’ recommendations.
Another program on the historic Black Press described how the porters regularly distributed copies of newspapers including the Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, AFRO American and Amsterdam News along their southern and western routes, helping to fuel the Great Migration.
In the first of her memoirs (and in the documentary on her life) Maya Angelou recounts being placed in the care of the Pullman porters when, at age three, she was sent by train from St. Louis, Missouri to live with her grandmother in Arkansas. Her name written on a piece of brown paper bag and placed around her neck with twine.
And several recountings of the March On Washington For Jobs and Freedom included the pivotal work of A. Phillip Randolph. He not only assembled the porters into forming the country’s first African American-led labor union, the Brotherhood of the Sleeping Car Porters in 1925, he served as lead organizer of the 1963 March – 22 years after he’d first proposed a national civil rights march in 1941 during the Roosevelt administration.
I realized how so many holes in the fabric of our chronology have been filled for me, so many separate swatches that, rewoven, serve as the very political, psychological, cultural and spiritual foundation upon which I rest my worldview. Because of this work, I am wrapped in a rich and ever-evolving understanding of who I truly am in this mad human drama called life.
