Walk to Freedom

At 3:00 P.M. on June 23, 1963, at the corner of Woodward Avenue and Adelaide Street, the Walk to Freedom began. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called it “the largest and greatest demonstration for freedom ever held in the United States” to date. It was the anniversary of the 1943 Detroit Race Riot. More than 125,000 people walked down Woodward Avenue toward Cobo Hall in quiet support of the civil rights protests in Birmingham, Alabama. The march also denounced housing segregation and economic discrimination that African Americans faced in the North. Led by the Reverends C. L. Franklin and Albert Cleage Jr. and organized by James Del Rio and the Detroit Council for Human Rights, the march was funded in part by the United Auto Workers led by Walter Reuther. The massive Walk to Freedom civil rights march ended at Cobo Hall, where 25,000 people packed the auditorium to hear Dr. King give his “I Have a Dream” speech for the first time. Outside, thousands of marchers listened as he acknowledged a growing sense of urgency in the Civil Rights Movement. When Dr. King declared, “We want all our rights, we want them here, and we want them now,” the crowd erupted in approval. He then urged the organization of a march on Washington, D.C., to “arouse the conscience of the nation” and pressure Congress to pass the Civil Rights Bill. The founder of Motown Records, Berry Gordy, recorded and released Dr. King’s Detroit speech. The Walk to Freedom marked a turning point in the Civil Rights Movement and set the stage for Detroit’s emergence as a center for Black Power in the late 1960s.