"I had this feeling that we were going to throw a big party and nobody comes," Jones recalls.
But people did come — at least 250,000 of them. Still, Jones also worried that the crowd might also include agitators, "some of what I called 'agent provocateurs' — white as well as black," Jones says. "I didn't know whether some of the black nationalists who were opposed to Dr. King's non-violence, or whether some of the people from the right wing, the Klan ... would provoke something."
And then there was the delicate and thorny issue of wrangling all those celebrities, Jones says, like Marlon Brando, Shelley Winters, Sidney Poitier, Joanne Woodward, Paul Newman, Joan Baez, Odetta and Bob Dylan, to name just a few.
