For many people who organized weeks or even months ahead to travel to Washington, D.C., for the Aug. 28 demonstration marking the anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, the trip ended before it began. In city after city, chartered buses that groups had booked and paid for simply failed to show up, stranding riders in parking lots and on sidewalks before dawn and, in some cases, keeping entire delegations from the demonstration altogether.
Local media reports from several cities suggest the pattern stretched across the country, with bus no-shows in Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Houston, and possibly other cities. Organizers in each city described the same basic sequence: Buses expected in the early morning hours never arrived, and explanations, when they came at all, arrived late and were thin on detail.
In North Philadelphia, 100 people gathered before dawn at Progress Plaza expecting two chartered buses. Neither came, NBC10 Philadelphia reported. The group included members of the Philadelphia NAACP, the Pennsylvania chapter of the National Action Network, students from Cheyney, Temple, and Rutgers universities, and members of Mother Bethel AME Church.
“We were told originally that the bus…would arrive at 5 o’clock,” Philadelphia NAACP president Catherine Hicks said. “It’s 5:30 a.m., and the bus doesn’t come.” Rev. Carolyn Cavaness called the experience “insidious, and it’s very hurtful,” saying marchers “felt robbed of that right,” according to the Philadelphia Tribune.
Two other buses were reportedly expected at another location in Philadelphia, but they also failed to show.
In Chicago, at least five teenagers with the youth mentoring group I Am a Gentleman were unable to make the trip after buses coming from Indiana were cancelled with less than two hours’ notice, ABC7 Chicago found. The National Action Network’s Chicago chapter lost four charter buses as well, though it managed to arrange alternate transportation.
“You do not communicate a national breakdown less than two hours before departure time,” said Jermaine Lawrence Anderson, the group’s executive director. Cleveland-area buses were also cancelled without explanation, according to local reporting, with organizers there saying they were given no explanation.
The most consistent account of what went wrong came from the National Action Network’s Indiana chapter, which said it had been informed that “the necessary bus permits were not granted for buses traveling from Indiana, as well as buses originating from a few other states.”
The organization called it “an unexpected development” outside the control of NAN Indiana, its bus captains, or the National Action Network nationally. It did not say which agency withheld the permits, why, or why the notice came so close to departure time.
That explanation has not settled the question for many organizers, who note that the cancellations hit multiple cities and several states within the same 48-hour window, with no bus company or permitting authority publicly identified in any of the reporting so far.
“We’re having trouble across the country with some of the buses…shutting down buses without a reason,” said Rev. Jerome Fordham in Philadelphia. Hicks was blunter: “It would be nice to think it was just a clerical error, but I don’t see that.
“There was a mix-up all right,” Fordham told a reporter, “an intentional mix-up.” He speculated on possible causes for the cancellations but said there is not yet any solid explanation of what happened. None of the organizers interviewed by local journalists had any proof of coordinated interference, and several were careful to say they could not be certain what caused the breakdown.
But the scale and simultaneous nature of the cancellations, paired with the unclear “permit” explanation, has left civil rights groups across the country asking the same question: How many people who intended to march on Aug. 28 never made it to Washington at all?
With turnout estimates for the anniversary demonstration still being assessed, organizers say the answer may matter as much as the march itself.
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