The 1963 March on Washington happened in August of 1963. Nancy Schimmel belonged to the San Francisco chapter of the organization Women for Peace. She and other members of the group traveled to the March on a CORE sponsored bus all the way from San Francisco, California. She remembers “the bus driver persuading us to let him take us to the Amana Colony restaurant in Iowa instead of “ a traditional bus stop. “He was so right” she recalls, because the food was terrific. The bus arrived the day before the March. That night she and her group from San Francisco attended a dinner that the DC Women for Peace Chapter hosted. “What I remember is not the food but that the local women were not going on the march. They were afraid of violence.” Schimmmel and her San Francisco colleagues spent the night in a university dorm somewhere in or around the capital but she doesn’t recall which school it was. They ate breakfast in the cafeteria the next morning and then headed off for the site of the March.
