Black community Quote by Stephen M. Ward

““Grace regarded her participation in the March on Washington Movement (MOWM) in Chicago as “the turning point in my life” because, as she told Horace Cayton years later, she had come to Chicago searching for the basis of a “new civilization” and found it “in the Negroes mobilizing themselves for the March on Washington. I shall never forget the transformation that took place in them with the call for the march.” 17 As a young, emerging radical, the sense of political possibility embodied in the MOWM made a considerable impression on her thinking. Specifically, it gave her a workable model and clear vision of a mass movement. Furthermore, it gave her an appreciation for the potential of grassroots politics not only to confront social injustice but also to effect individual and community transformation. Finally, the MOWM cemented Grace’s commitment to black political struggle. “The March on Washington changed my life,” she wrote more than half a century later. It “taught me lessons that have shaped my activities ever since.” One of these lessons was “that a movement begins when large numbers of people, having reached the point where they feel they can’t take the way things are any longer, find hope for improving their daily lives in an action that they can take together.” Even more important for her own political trajectory, she “also discovered the power that the black community has within itself to change this country when it begins to move. As a result, I decided that what I wanted to do with the rest of my life was to become a movement activist in the black community.” 18””

— Stephen M. Ward