♪ We are not afraid ♪ ♪ We are not afraid ♪ - People were energized.

People were in a good mood.

There's a lot of camaraderie.

The whole atmosphere was one of, really of celebration that just to see so many people Whites as well as Black.

♪ Deep in my heart ♪ - There was no way you couldn't go.

You had to be part of something much bigger than you were doing daily.

♪ Overcome some day ♪ (gentle music) - The thing I remember was being so tired.

I sat down under the tree.

I just wanted to rest.

I was so tired.

I can't actually remember hearing Dr. King make the speech.

- It was that speech, the March on Washington, I Have a Dream speech which answered this young man's question as to what he was gonna do with the rest of his life.

- Made it feel like this is really we're moving forward as a as a country, not just Black versus White.

At's Americans making this better, a better country.

- After I heard Dr. King speak, I knew that I wanted to be a Freedom Fighter like him.

And soon after that speech, I was on my way as a Freedom Rider to Mississippi to work against segregation.

- My father was a civil rights leader and one of my most exciting things that I remember him sharing was when he went to the March on Washington.

(gentle music) (energetic music) - Well, Pittsburgh was like other American industrial cities in some ways.

And in some ways Pittsburgh was very different.

It was like other cities in that you had a large Black migration here during and after World War I when the steel mills finally opened up, industry opened up to Blacks, so that you had people coming from the deep South in large numbers than like World War I, the 1920s.

And it picked up again during World War II, as well, and continued here until the 1950s.

And with that migration you had the usual set of problems that were created elsewhere, the rise of the ghetto of segregated housing conditions, race relations in some ways deteriorated as newcomers poured in, but it was different from other cities in that the Hill District, which is where most Blacks lived was really quite open to opportunities.

- When that first recognized the world, it was a Black world.

Very few White people entered that world.

The rent man would come to collect the rent.

The insurance man would come to collect the insurance and the policeman would drive through a walk through.

That was the only White people who we knew.

Everybody else was Black.

- My community, the North side, went through several evolutions.

When I was young and in high school, it was a pretty extraordinary place.

There were at least six foreign languages spoken in the North side, Slovak, German, Italian, and so on.

And I went to an elementary school where the kids spoke six different languages.

Back then we didn't call it cultural diversity.

We called was a neighborhood.

(jazz music) - My initial upbringing as a very young child was in an area called the Lower Hill District.

The Hill District was the center of the African-American population in Pittsburgh.

And it was also the center of cultural and social and economic life in Pittsburgh.

- And my father was Bishop Charles H Foggie of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.

And my mother was Madeline Sharp Foggie.

She grew up in the Hill District.

My father was a civil rights leader.

He was president of our local branch of the NAACP.

He was one of the founders of NEED the Negro Emergency Education Drive.

There's my dad.

And this is his church.

He helped break the color barrier of the Pittsburgh Symphony as a board member.

- It was a pretty good childhood growing up in Beaver Falls.

We weren't in a segregated school.

We were in an integrated school, even though there were limitations that I could see as I got older.

For example, there were clubs that took a long time for Black students to become involved in.

We didn't have Black cheerleaders when I was in school.

It wasn't overt.

So we didn't really feel the sting of it.

Now, there were certain things in the community that we knew were different.

There was a swimming pool that we couldn't swim in.

- Woolworth's Department Store simply wouldn't serve Blacks here, just like they didn't serve Blacks down in North Carolina.

It wasn't in the law, but it was informally.

People would go in and they just tell you, sorry we don't serve, the word was colored at that time.

- We picketed Duquesne Light Company and the Kaufmann Department Store and Gimbel's department store where they wouldn't allow Black people to try on clothes.

They wouldn't allow Black people to be employed there.

So there was a great deal of confrontation.

And then there was the rising in incidents of police brutality.

- My father was a building tradesman.

He couldn't get a job with a union because they wouldn't take any Black folks.

My mom always had a desire to be a seamstress.

They wouldn't hire Black folks to be seamstresses when she was coming along.

So my parents had a direct exposure to discrimination and we saw it in more indirect ways in high school and in the community.

There were segregated pools and so forth.

Dormont pool was segregated.

- I felt it more in terms of with my mom.

We'd go down to Kaufmann's or Gimbel's downtown.

And because of her complexion some people thought she was White and the two of us together, they might not know, but they might know.

If they knew that we were not White they might make us wait.

Where we go to Gimbel's tea room and they wouldn't see us in a nice seat.

There was a skating rink in New Brighton that we could only go one day a week.

So we knew there was a difference but it didn't seem as harsh, for example, as what we were seeing as I got in my teenage years and the Civil Rights Movement started.

That sort of awakened a lot of things in people that they realized well things shouldn't be this way and they don't have to be this way.

(gentle music) - I came to Pittsburgh in 1960.

It was very segregated.

Hospitals like the Braddock hospital, at the time, very segregated.

The medical staffs were for the most part still segregated.

Montefiore was one of the few that had an integrated staff.

- Then the economy started to change.

And there were a lot of people who used to go to work who weren't working anymore.

And there were a lot of protests that were starting to evolve for the right to work at places where we shopped.

Then we used to hear about the freedom movement in the South led by Martin Luther King and the SCLC.

And so we were influenced by that leadership for civil rights and the Civil Rights Movement.

And Pittsburgh began to take shape around the right of people here to live a full and nondiscriminatory life.

- So by the time of the March on Washington Black Pittsburghers were really well-prepared and felt themselves part of a national movement against segregation and discrimination, and really participated with a lot of energy and fervor in that.

(energetic music) (crowd chattering) - 1963, I was 16 years old.

I was involved with a group called the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

It had a Pittsburgh chapter.

And I got involved with that and through that I obviously heard about this big build up for this march in DC.

- There were a lot of people in Pittsburgh at the time involved in the civil rights activity through the Episcopal church.

I was at a car was a couple of Episcopal priests and several other, and one or two other lay people who were working in the movement.

And I think there were five or six cars of, we kind of made our way down there.

- I was 16 at the time.

Because my mom was real involved with the NAACP they decided to take buses to the march.

And so there were buses from Pittsburgh and it filtered down through Beaver County.

- We charted the train from Pittsburgh.

So that's the first thing.

We went at night and got there in the morning.

We all ended up basically running through the reflecting pool at the Jefferson Memorial and essentially it was partially festival and partially political movement.

- I was a graduate student in Buffalo at the University of Buffalo.

But for the march I came back to Dayton where the Dayton NAACP organized a train.

Before I left one of my high school friends, a White fellow, good friend of mine he called me up and he was so nervous.

He said, "Larry, I understand that you're going to Washington, they're gonna take over the government there.

Is that true?"

Oh no.

I said Vic, nobody's gonna take over the government.

It's just a march to try to secure civil rights.

Oh, but he said, "I've heard it gonna be very very dangerous and a lot of violence.

And why are people doing that?

Why are they so angry?"

And I said, well Vic, if you went through the sorts of things that Black Americans go through you know you'd be out angry and demonstrating.

- I was always preparing events for my dad to go to or for us to be at.

And I spent a lot of time at adult events listening to this.

And one of my most exciting things that I remember him sharing was when he went to the March on Washington.

(upbeat music) So he had gotten this eight millimeter film camera and he was running around taking pictures of everything.

So when the march came up he had been practicing and he took it with him.

You can see the pride.

Everyone looks lovely.

They're in hats and gloves and suits and it's August 28th I believe and it's boiling hot.

And there's a sea of people, you know, from one end from the monument to the other monument.

- Up on the stage they had a lineup of gospel groups and other entertainers who were keeping the crowd entertained and then these speakers started coming out, people like Julian Bond and Stokely Carmichael, John Lewis, and several speakers from labor organizations and other civil rights organizations.

- And after a while we expect freedom, freedom, freedom now.

(crowd cheering) - [Man] The crowd continued to swell.

And every time I looked back it seemed to be another 10 or 20000 people had arrived on the mall.

- I think the mood was very upbeat and very optimistic and very hopeful.

Primarily because there were hundreds of thousands of people who were standing there looking at each other.

So it became clear that this was a massive movement.

- It was the most compelling kind of national feeling of potential.

I suppose that's what was in a lot of peoples minds, you know, this is big.

This is gonna result in something.

This can have an impact.

- It was a good representation of what America's all about, or should be all about.

So that in of itself was encouraging because many people identify with the civil rights struggle and said, well, I may not be African-American.

I see something in this in this that has something to do with me.

- The crowd that was gathered there was probably the most eclectic and diverse gathering of people that had ever descended on Washington.

♪ Some day.

♪ I remember thinking about how this was the kind of the new look.

This was the new American scene right there spread out.

- Finally late in the afternoon they introduced the man of the hour.

I expected from all of the hype about Dr. King to see a giant of a man come out on stage.

But when Dr. King came out he was this little guy.

He came out, everybody kind of parted the way and let him through and I said look at this guy.

He's a little guy.

But he came out and took the mic and he just absolutely mesmerized a quarter of a million people who had arrived on the mall.

- You could have heard a pin drop with a quarter of a million people all crowded together.

- Today he's revered, but then some people liked what he was doing.

Some people looked at him as a trouble maker.

It was an event, but I don't think anybody knew how significant this was going to be.

- I was so far from King I really couldn't really hear much of what he said.

But it didn't matter.

You just hear the crowd roar and then you'd roar with them.

- I can't actually remember hearing Dr. King make the speech.

And that's one of my biggest regrets to this day.

- I don't remember anything except Dr. King's speech.

It's said to me that here's this man who through no real choice of his own got saddled with the responsibility of leading a whole group of people out of poverty and despair into hope and that he had big shoulders and that we really needed to step up and help this guy so that he didn't have to carry all this weight by himself.

- King's speech about fulfilling the promise of America, the dream that he had, which was really an American dream resonated because he was really saying we want America to be what it's promised itself it could be and should be.

- And the impact it had on me was to make me decide that I want to join his army.

Whatever it is that he's doing I want to be with him.

And a few months later that's where I was.

I became a Freedom Rider and I was assigned to the Mississippi Delta.

And I went to the Mississippi Delta in the summer of '65.

It was supposed to be a four month commitment.

It turned into four years.

- I got caught up in the momentum, excitement, of what he was talking about and said I got to be a part of this.

I got to help out.

- I think Martin Luther King was more influential and more powerful than people even realized then.

I don't think he was looked at any more just as a Black man trying to get rights for Black people.

He was trying to show that he was a man trying to get rights for American citizens.

And I think that started to do that with that march.

- Watching that as a little girl helped me to understand what it was that he went to go see and why it was important.

And he explained to me that the march was to make sure that you have the right, Charlene, to go to the schools you'd like, to ride on he buses you'd like, to have the jobs you'd like, to have the education opportunities that you'd like, to be able to be the person that you deserve to be.

- After the march then came a fair amount of disillusionment, not long after the march you had the bombing in Birmingham.

The resistance in the South didn't go away.

It became clear that this march and all the good intentions were not enough, that this wasn't going to just be a cakewalk or something that we were on the yellow brick road, something like that.

This was we were in for a long, hard slog.

- I think things changed.

For example, I think people were willing, more willing to protest things that they saw that they felt weren't right.

- My decision was to figure out how I could make a contribution at the institutional level.

I mean, you had to sort of decide.

All right, what do you want to be?

Do you want to be a politician?

Do you want to do voter registration drives?

You wanna work in hunger, homelessness, whatever?

- I think that there was a pin put in the issue.

There was a focal point, something that large makes it known that things are changing.

And from that year forward, from that moment in that event I think you see an understanding that we're not taking this anymore.

- So I knew something about Manchester Craftman's Guild in terms of a concept of working with kids in the community.

I was an artist at that point.

So I thought the best way I can contribute to Dr. King's legacy is to build a center to start working with a lot of these kids who were struggling and see if I could provide them with a better outcome than the school system and the community had provided them up to that point.

And then I took over Bedwell a couple years later.

So essentially my life's work has been a demonstration of my belief in everything Dr. King talked about and everything he lived for.

- It started to stir something in me that I didn't even know was happening at the time, a certain pride that I didn't even know was there.

I started the Black Studies Program in Beaver Falls High School as a result of students requesting that there be a course.

The course is still being taught here.

And I think that Beaver Falls is the only county that still as a Black Studies program.

- There was less racial tension here than in other cities.

Pittsburgh was pointing the way that people can move forward without excessive violence.

And this came out in the 1968 after King's assassination when all of American erupted.

Pittsburgh certainly erupted.

You had the Hill District suffered great violence, a lot of buildings were burned down.

But there was only death in Pittsburgh, only one fatality in all of that.

- When my father was elected to the bishopric when I was 10 in 1968, the most volatile year of all it seemed, we had to move out of the parsonage and move to our own home.

One of our good friends, Robert Lovell was a real estate agent.

And he wanted to secure listings in White neighborhoods and we wanted to have a large house that was kind of close to where I went to school.

So we were trying to buy the house.

But we were having a little trouble.

And come to find out in later years that the neighbors were trying to pool their money and buy the house so that we could not, because they heard that this Black Bishop who was a big hot head civil rights leader was coming.

We pulled up to the house one day and the n word was spray painted on the garage door.

- The overt discriminatory practices that had existed before really dissolved in this period.

The downtown stores were hiring Black clerks.

The customers were being served at the restaurants and other places downtown.

So, most of the sort of overt Jim Crow types of things that had gone on it had disappeared by then, really by the late 50s they were pretty well gone, certainly by the late 60s.

- We looked at discrimination in the health professions and in health, one from the side of the provider and not being able to get these services and therefore created health centers and worked in neighborhood, created a lot of neighborhood health centers.

So you worked heavily on the production side to get representation in the health professions, whether it was nursing or medicine, public health, get representation of African-Americans there.

The creation of the Freedom House Ambulance Company, which was designed as a employment and career pathway for African-American both men and women into the health professions, that simply, that was possible.

Certainly the most dramatic change that I could see is in the pure numbers in medical school, for example, whereas Pitt Medical School in those days one of two African-Americans per class.

Now the population is representative of the general Black population.

So that is a real piece of progress.

- Dr. King's dream was a huge dream.

It was a far reaching dream.

Some aspects of that dream have been realized.

Other aspects of the dream have not yet been realized and we continue to have to fight, but it enabled me to become elected to the Pittsburgh City Counsel and to use my position on City Counsel to build monuments like the Freedom Corner Monument, or the August Wilson Center, or so many other projects.

- I feel a lot of progress has been made as far as education and the integrating of societies.

But there's still a lot of problems.

I look at, for example, President Obama.

I mean that was one of the highlights of my life, being alive when we finally got a Black president.

But when you look at how he's been treated many times and still continues to be treated by people that opposed him, partially I believe a lot of that is racially motivated.

Then you know the dream hasn't been reached yet.

- There's a arch ends on 2009 in February when I returned back to the Lincoln Monument and the Mall on Washington where I started and I'm able to witness the culmination of that march with the inauguration of the first African-American president of the United States all within my lifetime.

- And there is no end point.

It's the process that you have to remember for Dr. King.

He recognized full well that this was a movement, a process, a strategy, and that it would take place over the entire course of any individuals life, and that what you needed to commit yourself to was a life long commitment to these principles.

- Dr. King's dream of an America, which you'd be judged not by the color of your skin but by the content of your character we know that there's still a long way to go in that.

But we also know that a lot of progress has been made.

(calming music) ♪ We shall overcome some day ♪ (energetic music)