An excerpt from Harvard Sitkoff’s KING on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington
The turnout on August 28, 1963, exceeded all expectations. Nearly a quarter of a million Americans, including some seventy-five thousand whites, descended on Washington by airplane and by foot, by twenty-two chartered trains, two thousand chartered buses, and thousands of car pools, in the nation’s largest ever demonstration for black rights. The day became a celebration, a rally and a church picnic, a day of glorious music—sometimes solemn, sometimes joyous. African-American school bands alternated marching songs and hymns. Joan Baez chanted, “We shall overcome someday.” Peter, Paul and Mary wondered, “How many times must a man look up before he can see the sky?” Bob Dylan rasped a ballad of the murder of the NAACP’s Medgar Evers. Almost as one, the huge assemblage clapped to deep-throated Odetta’s “If they ask you who you are, tell them you’re a child of God,” and shed a tear as Mahalia Jackson bellowed “I been ’buked and I been scorned” in a way that seemed to echo off the distant Capitol.
The marchers good-naturedly endured the heat and humidity of summertime Washington as well as the endless introduction of notables and clichés by a dozen speakers. The abundance of platitudes and absence of passion led some to nap, some to walk away. Others frolicked in the Reflecting Pool between the shrines of Washington and Lincoln. It did not matter. They had made their point through their presence, through their good temper and dignified demeanor. The several thousand federal troops stationed nearby would not be needed, much less the fifteen thousand paratroopers on standby in North Carolina. Nor, it soon became clear, was it necessary to institute a citywide ban on liquor sales and to prepare the courts for round-the-clock sessions to process offenders. To the millions of white Americans watching the live broadcast on the three networks, African Americans appeared not as the criminals or servile fools usually shown on TV but as churchly crusaders in a heroic quest to be free and equal.
Late in the sweltering afternoon, A. Philip Randolph introduced the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as “the moral leader of our nation.” King had been, as Roy Wilkins put it, “assigned the rousements.” King would not fail; he and his staff had worked for hours polishing the seven-minute speech to a high sheen the night before. As he walked to the podium, the cheers swelled.
The minister placed his text on the lectern, nodded his thank-you to the vast assembly, and inhaled slowly, deeply. “Fivescore years ago,” he said on an exhale, reading from a prepared lecture that was as smooth in prose as it was rough in its descriptions of injustice. It emphasized white America’s hypocrisy and reneging on promises to blacks. King reminded his audience in words reminiscent of the stone figure of Lincoln above him that the hopes generated by the Emancipation Proclamation had still not been fulfilled. To underscore how little had changed, how much American racism persisted, he peppered the passage with a “One hundred years later” refrain.
“One hundred years later, the Negro is still not free.” His deep tones came in a slow cadence. Summoning images of shackled, hobbled black slaves, he claimed, “The life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.” [YESSIR!] Forced to remain separated from whites, the Negro, an outsider, “lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.” Still “languished in the corners of American society,” he “finds himself an exile in his own land.” [TELL IT, DOCTOR!] Presenting blacks as victims of white racism, King would not appease those who sought relief from the mounting black struggle.
Launching a metaphor of America’s obligation to blacks, King described the promises of the Declaration of Independence as “a sacred obligation” that had proved to be, for African Americans, “a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ ” But, he said to roars of agreement, “we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity in this nation.” [YESSIR!] They had come to collect on the promise, he observed, looking as far into the distant crowd as possible, to cash the check “that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.” “Sho ’nuff,” a woman near the platform shouted, laughing.
King melodiously praised the “veterans of creative suffering,” urging them to continue the struggle. “Now is the time to make real the promises of Democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God’s children. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. [NOW! NOW! NOW!] This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.” [OH YES!] [FREEDOM!] [NOW!]
King never mentioned patience. He spoke of neither cooling off nor gradualism. “Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. [AMEN!] There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. [YEAH!] [THAT’S RIGHT!] The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.”
In deep, rising tones, King responded to those who asked, “When will you be satisfied?”
We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating “For Whites Only.” We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.
King hurled each image at the whites who thought blacks received the same general treatment as whites. With the certitude of the Gospels, he vowed to all who believed the race problem had been solved that there would be no stopping the movement until African Americans gained their full and equal civil rights, until the nation’s promise to blacks was fulfilled. Whoops and hollers of approval reached skyward. Keep protesting, he said. “Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our modern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.” Until then, he cautioned the two thirds of the American public who disapproved of civil rights demonstrations, there would be no surcease from nonviolent direct action. His allotted seven minutes up, King felt impelled to keep preaching.
“Tell ’em about the dream, Martin,” Mahalia Jackson shouted. Like others who frequently accompanied King, she had heard his peroration that unfailingly left the audience enraptured. He had used this climactic ending, based on a sermon of Prathia Hall, to great effect at a mass meeting in Birmingham in April and in addressing 125,000 supporters in Detroit in June. He had also freely employed for half a dozen years the “Let freedom ring” coda, taken almost verbatim from an address given to the 1952 Republican National Convention by Archibald Carey. Eager to energize the movement, to send it back to the struggle with positive resolve, King harkened back to those orations again with his extemporized conclusion.
Setting aside “the difficulties of today and tomorrow,” King pictured the better country the protesters sought. “I have a dream,” he proclaimed, envisioning a nation of racial justice and social harmony, “a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.” Blending Amos, Isaiah, the Declaration of Independence, and “America,” the dream harmonized King’s program for racial change with America’s most basic ideals. It both assuaged white fears about the movement and heartened the massive assemblage of civil rights activists, becoming more utopian and yet believable as the crowd’s antiphonal responses surged from the Washington Monument to the monumental Lincoln.
“I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the State of Mississippi,”—then in the feverish grip of the Klan and Citizens’ Councils—“a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.” [TELL US. I SEE IT!] In a nation with hundreds of laws in 1963 that defined what a person could do and be on the basis of race, King dreamed that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” [YES! YES!]
Still more audacious, King dreamed that one day in Alabama, leaving no stone unturned to maintain the separation of the races, “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.” He lifted his voice to the sky. “I have a dream today!”
Spines tingled, eyes teared, and shouts of approval swelled as the preacher’s rapture gloried in every valley being exalted, every hill and mountain being made low, the rough places made smooth, the crooked places straightened, the glory of the Lord revealed, and all flesh seeing it together. Tapping the wellspring for an end to evil and for a truly united country, the timbre of King’s voice cut through the din of this Pentecostal moment. “With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, 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.”
Each lilting passage had increased the crowd’s roar. Seeking to raise it yet higher, King trumpeted: “Let freedom ring!” Let it ring from hills and mountains everywhere in the United States, he implored above the tumult, from every hamlet and city and state. When we do, he went on, raising his right arm in benediction, his voice almost meditative, “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.’ ”
Waving to the multitude, the young minister stepped back to shouts of “Free at last! Free at last! Free at last!” “The Kingdom of God,” Coretta Scott King remembered, “seemed to have come on earth.”
Excerpted from KING: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop by Harvard Sitkoff, published in 2008 by Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2008 by Harvard Sitkoff. All rights reserved.
Harvard Sitkoff is the author or editor of more than eight books, including The Struggle for Black Equality, A New Deal for Blacks, and A History of Our Time.
