Wall Street Journal issues correction on article from 1963 quoting John Lewis

The Wall Street Journal issued a lengthy correction Tuesday of an article that ran in 1963 and misquoted the late civil rights icon and Democratic lawmaker John Lewis.

“An Aug. 29, 1963, article about the civil-rights movement’s March on Washington incorrectly quoted several parts of the speech of John Lewis, who was then the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. It appears that the Journal relied on an early draft of Lewis’s speech rather than the speech Lewis actually delivered on Aug. 28, 1963,” the Journal wrote.

One example cited by the Journal related to Lewis’s comments on the Kennedy administration’s civil rights bill. The article quoted Lewis as saying, “We cannot support the Administration’s civil rights bill, for it is too little and too late.” In reality, Lewis actually said, “We come here today with a great sense of misgiving. It is true that we support the administration’s civil-rights bill. We support it with great reservation, however.”

The Journal said the same article also misquoted Walter Reuther, who was president of the auto workers union at the time, noting he “did call upon Congress to enact without delay the civil-rights program proposed by President Kennedy, but he didn’t use those exact words, and that statement shouldn’t have been in quotation marks.”

Lewis, a leading figure of the Civil Rights Movement and fixture of Democratic politics, died in July 2020.

It is unclear how the Journal was made aware of the incorrect information in the nearly six-decade-old article but said in its correction that “readers can alert The Wall Street Journal to any errors in news articles.”