“The March” – James Blue’s documentary of the August 28, 1963, March on Washington for Freedom and Jobs: A Digital Exhibition.

April 01, 2019

James Blue’s 1964 documentary The March, which captures on film the August 28, 1963, March on Washington for Jobs and Justice, indicts America for its system of apartheid and illustrates how interracial collaborations might dismantle it. With a grant from the Mellon Foundation, I worked with a team to create a digital exhibition of James Blue’s The March: https://blogs.uoregon.edu/themarch/ and see it as a good illustration of “rhetorical research that brings the ideas and insights of rhetorical scholarship to a general audience.”

In a January 17, 1964, letter to President Lyndon Johnson, USIA director Edward R. Murrow wrote that The March was “probably the finest argument for peaceful petition of redress of grievance that has ever been put on film.” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., one of the reigning historians and film critics of the era, concurred writing that “James Blue, a young and gifted film maker … has made [with The March] what will surely go down as one of the great documentaries.”  The film won First Prize for Human Relations at the Venice Documentary Festival (1963); Grand Prize in Documentary at the International Ibero-American and Philippine Film Festival in Bilbao, Spain (1964); a Diploma of Merit at the 14th Melbourne Festival in Australia (1965); First Prize at the Cannes Youth Festival (1966); and First Prize at the Netherlands Film Festival (1966).  The film was entered into the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2013 for its cultural, historical, and aesthetic importance to American society.  The film was preserved and restored by the National Archives for the fiftieth anniversary of the MOW.

Blue’s film serves as the March on Washington’s contemporary visual background. The National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in 2016, features images from “The March” in the section dedicated to the Modern Civil Rights Movement.

The digital exhibition features criticism of the film from two opposing sources: conservatives who argued that the documentary damaged America’s image in the global Cold War by airing its “dirty laundry” in its condemnation of American racism and progressives (mostly modern-day) who claim that Blue “airbrushed” American racism by featuring interracial collaboration in his film. The digital exhibition addresses the film’s contested legacy through an excavation of its creation, history, and the critical reception it received.

James Blue majored in speech and theater, and the influence his understanding of rhetoric is evident in his production of the documentary and in my organization of the digital exhibition. James Blue filmed Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” address, which is much studied in our discipline and serves as The March’s central touchstone.

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