In January, we celebrated the birthday of Martin Luther King- who was one of the leading inclusionists in US history.

I got to witness inclusionist history in 1963 when I attended the March on Washington with 250,000 other people, and this week I was honored to be a featured guest on two radio shows to share my experience.

I was in junior high now called middle school, in New York when I went . I didn’t have a particular ideology, nor was I an activist at that time.

About 4 years before that, I was walking with my friend, and her mother when we passed a Woolworths with people marching back and forth in front of the store, holding signs and chanting, “1234 Don’t Go In Here Any More, 5678 Southern Woolworths Segregate.”

I was told that they were protesting because Black people weren’t allowed to eat at the lunch counters at Woolworths in the Southern states or our country. I thought about my black friends, and that if they were in the south, we wouldn’t be able to eat lunch together, and it upset me, so I joined the picket line.

So when people from my overnight camp were organizing a few busloads of people to go to Washington for the March, I volunteered. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but again I thought about my friends. I think I thought it would be like marching in front of Woolworths with a a bunch of people. That was a mistaken assumptions because it was so much more.

My strongest memory was looking out the window of the bus as we arrived in DC, and seeing thousands of people lining the streets, smiling, and waving. It seemed to happen in slow motion, I had never seen so many people, and never seen so many different kinds of people together.

I remember the chill I got, and how my whole mind, body, and emotions were consumed with feelings of love, and welcome, and being part of something so huge.

It was the first time I had felt so connected to the world, and I was only thirteen.

I knew that day, that it was not just one day for me. I had no idea what was next, but I knew it wasn’t the end.

I felt that I, that young Jewish girl from the Bronx, was where I belonged. The optimism, unity, love and joy that day was almost surreal.

On the way back to New York, we stopped for food at a diner in Maryland, where they refused to serve us, because we were an integrated group. Someone organized an impromptu, spontaneous sit-in and we stayed until they served us.

I was asked during one of the interviews to talk about what it was like as a young white girl to have Black and other non-white friends. I hadn’t thought about it from that perspective before, but there were people who couldn’t understand why I had friends who were different and why I would want to be around people who were dif
ferent than me. I was not in the popular crowd, didn’t get invited to a lot of the parties, didn’t know where I belonged, until years later, when I looked at my life realized that I belong in the world with people who want to create communities, workplaces and a world where everyone can do their best work, live their best life, and has an opportunity to excel and whatever they want and be happy.

Although my life went in several different directions, I took the value and vision of inclusion wherever I went, until I started my business as a diversity and inclusion consultant, and I became the inclusionist. But it was really that day in 1963, when the seeds of the “The Inclusionist,” were planted.