An important but little-known episode in the story of the March on Washington unfolded on Aug. 17, 1963, in a Paris nightclub called the Living Room.
In response to a call by the writer James Baldwin for his fellow Americans living in Paris to support the civil rights march, more than a hundred people — including the blues musician Memphis Slim and the actor William Marshall — crowded into the club for a meeting. The atmosphere was electric. The group believed that the pressure of foreign opinion could play a critical role in the civil rights movement, and they gathered to figure out how to energize it.
The pianist Art Simmons “spoke movingly of being forced every night to explain” American racial discrimination to Parisians, even as “he could not really explain it to himself,” recalled Barbara Sargent, wife of the pastor of the American Church in Paris.Paris was only one site of global action in support of the American civil rights movement. Around the world American expatriates, anticolonial activists and everyday citizens “marched on Washington,” delivering petitions to American embassies and consulates and holding marches of their own.
Continue reading here. And there's more on the worldwide reaction to the March at PRI's The World.