Fifty years ago, on Aug. 28, 1963, one of many American protests
became the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, achieving worldwide
acclaim with four simple words: “I have a dream.” The legend endures
beyond memory from a dwindling number of witnesses, but no one alive
that day anticipated its sweetly patriotic glow. Dr. Martin Luther King
groaned under pressure, planning to say nothing like those four words.
Bayard Rustin, a fabled pacifist in charge of logistics, prepared
feverishly for the unknown. “If you want to organize anything,” he
shouted to volunteers, “assume that everybody is absolutely stupid. And
assume yourself that you’re stupid.” Some of Rustin’s helpers slapped
together 80,000 cheese sandwiches. Others hauled 21 first-aid stations
to outdoor spots along the stately National Mall.
The public girded for mayhem. NBC’s Meet the Press aired
official predictions that it would be “impossible” for Negroes to
petition in numbers without civic disorder. A preview in Life magazine
surveyed Washington’s “worst case of invasion jitters since the First
Battle of Bull Run.” The Kennedy administration quietly deployed 4,000
riot troops near downtown, with 15,000 paratroopers on alert. A District
of Columbia order banned liquor sales for the first time since
Prohibition. Local hospitals stockpiled plasma and canceled elective
surgery to save beds. Most federal agencies urged employees to stay
home. Eighty percent of private business closed for the day. A week
ahead, to be safe, Major League Baseball postponed not one but two home
games for the Washington Senators.
Early
arrivals confounded these apprehensions. One jaunty teenager wafted
along Pennsylvania Avenue on roller skates, finishing a week-long
journey from Chicago. Trainloads of pilgrims spilled from Union Station
singing spirituals. A CBS camera mounted high in the Washington Monument
showed a panorama that swelled crowd estimates upward of 250,000. Bob
Dylan strummed his new folk anthem, Blowin’ in the Wind, and the
first black “airline stewardess” led cheers for progress. Rustin herded
dignitaries briskly through a long program, allowing emcee A. Philip
Randolph to introduce the final speaker ahead of his appointed time.
King looked over a vast spectacle. He had failed this closing task
once before from these steps at the Lincoln Memorial, with many of the
same civil rights leaders present.
He
opened his address by reaching back to Lincoln. “Five score years ago,”
King paraphrased, “a great American in whose symbolic shadow we stand
today signed the Emancipation Proclamation.” Against Lincoln’s fidelity
to national purpose, he threw up a clanging image of deadbeat history.
“America has given the Negro people a bad check,” King proclaimed, “a
check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ ” He said
segregation stamped default on freedom’s core promise. Heartfelt voices
cheered his raw illustrations along with his wishful hope not to find
always that “the bank of justice is bankrupt.”
Suddenly
King balked. He could not bring himself to continue his carefully speech.
King hesitated before a unique nation that was young and yet also the world’s seasoned pioneer in freedom.
“--I still have a dream,” King resumed. “It is a dream deeply rooted
in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise
up and live out the true meaning of its creed…” He took flight
extemporaneously on rhetoric ingrained in him but new to the huge
national audience. His cadence rose gradually through nine dreams of
racial justice into a tenth, spiritual vision from the prophet Isaiah.
“I have a dream, that one day every valley shall be exalted,” he said,
in pulsing delivery. “Every hill and mountain shall be made low, the
rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made
straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh
shall see it together!
“This
is our hope,” King continued, pulling back from a glimpse of purified
humanity. “This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this
faith…” Like a jazz musician, he composed off this phrase a second riff
on determination in pursuit of dreams. “With this faith,” it ended, “we
will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together,
to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that
we will be free one day.” King dramatized that prospect by reciting the
first verse of My Country, ’Tis of Thee, from sweet liberty and pilgrims to “Let freedom ring.”
Quickening
again, he pushed his baritone into high register. “And if America is to
be a great nation, this must become true,” King intoned. “So let
freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire…Let freedom
ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!” Eleven times he launched
variations on this third refrain, embracing not only the treasured
landscape but also fearsome bastions of white supremacy. “Let freedom
ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi!” he shouted. “From
every mountainside, let freedom ring!”
By then his distinctive voice enveloped
the words in a furnace of warring release, fusing ecstasy with anguish
and disappointment with hope.
“And when this happens,” King cried out, “when we allow freedom
to ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every
city, we will be able to speed up the day when all of God’s
children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and
Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old
Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are
free at last!’ ”
***
The speech
James Blue's film The March (1963)
PBS clip / full video (expires 9/10/13)
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