Vision

There was anxiety in Washington the day before the 1963 March on Washington. They were so worried, they closed the liquor stores. The opening line of the New York Times article spoke rather fearfully of the “vanguard” of tens of thousands of people, who had begun arriving on the roads and filling the bus and train stations. The largest marches up until that time had been only around 30-40,000 people, and it was pretty clear this would be bigger. Organizers hoped for 100,000. Martin Luther King was last on a long list of speakers.

The concern was unfounded. There was no violence, no major counter-protest (a small group of Nazis was quickly dispatched), little untoward behavior by police or protesters. People showed up en masse but marched as planned, gathered as planned, and patiently listened to speakers as planned. Their patience was rewarded: it was the largest protest march on Washington in history at the time, estimated at 250-300,000. And they heard one of the greatest orations ever delivered.

The Gathering

There had been marches to Washington before, protesting wages, unemployment, and civil rights. Five thousand walked in D.C. at the 1922 “Silent March” on Washington to urge passage of the Dyer anti-lynching bill. But few years later in 1925, the KKK brought 30,000 racists into Washington, one of the largest marches of its time. People came to Washington to protest multiple times during the Great Depression, looking for help and answers.

During the FDR administration, the idea of a march by Blacks to protest discrimination in jobs and the military was advanced repeatedly among leaders of civil rights organization. At the time, marches often helped to pressure Congress, but leaders weren’t sure that the “Court and Congress” strategy was all that effective for Blacks. Plessy vs. Ferguson, the Supreme Court decreeing “separate but equal” facilities were acceptable was only a few decades old in 1933.

The organizers of the 1963 march began planning in December 1961, after Kennedy was elected but in no hurry to champion civil rights. The courts had outlawed some types of segregation in the 1950s, but armed guards still had to accompany children to school. Mass marches and nonviolent demonstrations across many places had been effective, but organizers sensed it was a time to push for more. Kennedy and many in his party supported civil rights in concept, but he urged the organizers not to march. Civil rights was on the list, but low priority. He was working on a bill, people should be patient. Civil rights always are a “distraction” to those who don’t need it.

Not everyone agreed on who, when, what, and how to march. The civil rights vision at the time was not monolithic. Critics of the program pointed out that most of the speakers were white and none were women. Men marched down Constitution Avenue with the media; women were sent down Independence Avenue. Multiple groups argued that more direct action was needed, perhaps some demonstrations of nonviolent resistance, rather than walking and listening to speech. Others claimed no action was best of all. Leaders of supporting organizations, from unions to the Jewish and Catholic Leagues, angled to get a more prominent position on the program. Organizers rejected support by Communist groups and Black nationalists, so criticism came from both left and right.

They disagreed over the purpose. The original name was March for Jobs, which earned heavy support from union leaders. They added Freedom as an afterthought and eventually settled on demands including complete school integration, “meaningful” legislation to end discrimination, prohibiting discrimination in hiring, and a laundry list. It was also the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. This made it an easy to choice to stage the finale at the Lincoln Memorial.

How could they pull it off? 450 buses left from Harlem alone. In New York City, volunteers packaged up 80,000 cheese sandwiches. The organizers received a wave of death threats and bomb threats; a few planes were grounded, closing down the air space along with the liquor stores. Organizers were grilled by reporters about how they would avoid the inevitable rioting which would happen with so many angry people in one place. It was late August, the height of humidity in that swamp on the Potomac. Could they have enough medics? The planning committee paid a whopping $19,000 for a state-of-the-art sound system because as Bayard Rustin put it, “We can’t maintain order when people can’t hear.” Even so, many of the speakers didn’t work very well. Not everyone, standing all the way back to the Washington Monument, heard the words. They’d hear them later.

It all seemed to work beautifully, which happens when so many people work behind the scenes to make it happen. The media invested in multiple cameras and microphones to tape hours of live coverage, which is why we still have decent film today. The first aid stations, drinking fountains, and portable toilets were all vital contributions to the process.

The Speech

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech is considered one of greatest in American history. It was part planning and part accident, but even that spontaneity was part of a tradition.

Black speakers from Frederick Douglass to W.E.B. DuBois had forged a wide path for King to tread. As scholars have noted, there was a tradition for “celebration/protests” that dated back to Revolutionary War. Douglass had given a speech–“What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”–that set a strong precedent. He spoke at a traditional July 4th celebration in 1852, startling the listeners out of their patriotic reverie by pointing out the hypocrisy of celebrating freedom when liberty was still nonexistent for enslaved Blacks.

Black Americans had forged their own tradition of gathering on days to commemorate the liberation of the West Indies, the Fourth of July, the Emancipation Proclamation, and Juneteenth. They would come together in their Sunday best, prepared for a picnic and a protest. There was even a particular tradition of the “jeremiad” adopted by speakers, often Black ministers, who took on the role of the prophet speaking for the oppressed. It was a natural fit.

Most of what King said on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial was planned. His speech had been written and reviewed by advisors. The “dream” stuff had been stricken from the prepared text. He had used that dream imagery in multiple speeches before, small groups, and it had failed to strike a nerve. The organizers thought it would be better to critique than to inspire.

Listening to the whole speech (here) is an interesting experience, given that many of us have probably listened to the good part–the sound bites–a dozen times. The speech has been picked clean by Rhetoric professors and analysts who talk about the cadence, repetition, and the callbacks to the Bible and song. But the speech doesn’t begin with any of that. It begins with accounting.

As a former banker, I quite enjoyed the extended metaphor–that America had written a bad check, a promissory note never cashed, an NSF. But the crowd applause was reserved and only polite. They were hot, and it had been a long day. Who gets inspired by banking imagery? Many scholars like Christopher Neck have noted that King began his speech reading in a monotone from the text. Speaking, sure, but not preaching. Even when he moves to a middle section and repeats “Now is the time to make change,” to demand change, he is still in tame form, reading rather than orating.

Experts point to a section near the end, in the middle of a sentence: “I say to you today my friends…” where King pauses for a full ten seconds. Scholars argue that King heard Mahalia Jackson, who had sung earlier, say “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin.” The speechwriters agree that King was not supposed to talk about the dream. But he did.

He was allotted four minutes but spoke for thirteen. As he spoke, his voice grew stronger and more confident, words sung across the vast crowd. Those final words were not written in front of him, but he had said much of it before, and had plenty of practice in forming ideas to persuade a captive group of listeners. Still, the pivot to the dream was significant; it moved the speech from all that was wrong to all that could be right.

Not all of it was original, either. King often liberally borrowed, as his predecessors did, from all others. “Let freedom ring,” the callback to a song, was a phrase that others had used–Ida B. Wells, Archibald Carey. The “let justice roll down like water” phrase comes from the Book of Amos; the “arc of the moral universe” quote from Theodore Parker. It was not entirely about the exact words, but about all the words and who said them, in what way, and why.

The speech is interesting rhetorically, although it might not have won over hearts and minds had it not been at that time, and that place: the finale to the largest march Washington had ever seen, filmed live and viewed by millions, including Kennedy and Congress. King was the last speaker, and everybody was listening. It was a risk, a big opportunity, but he met the moment transcended it, fulfilled the moment so completely that everyone remains inspired and probably will forever more.

The Aftermath

Walter Cronkite’s CBS newscast that evening is interesting in its own right. Cronkite was impressed, but the piece mainly covered the marchers and opinions about the event in general. Midway in the story, a reporter interviews Strom Thurmond, a “knowledgeable” member of Congress, who suggests that he doesn’t know why these people march when they have so many things, like refrigerators. (I’m not making this up; for those unfamiliar, Thurmond was famously the most racist man in Congress.) Thirteen minutes of footage and a lengthy commentary by CBS pundit Eric Sevareid are included, but no one mentions the speeches or speakers. Apparently not everyone was overwhelmed by King’s Dream speech.

But James Reston’s column in the Times the next day focused on King’s speech. Reston noticed: “Dr. King touched all the themes of the day, only better than anybody else…He sent the crowd away feeling that the long journey might have been worthwhile.”

King spent another five years marching and speaking, advocating for everything from unions to civil rights to the end of the Vietnam War. In March 1968, he was in Memphis to speak to a group of striking sanitation workers. He was tired and not feeling well, but every time they asked, he would come again to inspire a crowd that wanted to recapture some of what had occurred at the magic moment on a hot August afternoon. The next morning, King was shot on his balcony by career criminal James Earl Ray, escaped from the Mississippi Penitentiary and hoping perhaps to gather a bounty from other racists.

Within a year of King’s assassination, several leaders began pressing for commemoration. Led by Congressman John Conyers, they argued that King’s legacy of civil rights and inspiration– that thirteen-minute speech–had a lasting impact. It took 15 years, but ultimately Ronald Reagan made Martin Luther King day a national holiday in 1983. Reagan was also famously anti-Communist, and he privately balked at supporting someone he believed to be a Marxist. However, Reagan was also a shrewd judge of public opinion, and it cost him no political capital.

Arizona, along with many other states, supported the holiday in the 1980s. But Republican Evan Meacham campaigned and won the governorship on a platform of eliminating the holiday, which he did in 1987. After years of controversy, the question was put to the voters. Civil rights leaders pressured the NFL to move the 1993 Super Bowl to a different state if Arizona refused to accept MLK Day. The voters voted No to the holiday ,and the NFL took the game to Pasadena. Two years later, the vote resurfaced, and football won out. Arizona voted to celebrate Martin Luther King Day. Somehow it seems fitting that college football’s national championship is being played today.

I found researching these details to be inspiring in a second way. Pundits at the time focused on what the President and the Congress was doing, rather than the people. But our perspective now sees something else, something much more important.

There were marches across the country today, thousands of marches with hundreds of thousands of people. MLK Day is also a Day of Service, with volunteer groups and businesses organizing everything from picking up trash to feeding the homeless. The company I work for sent a note to encourage us–What can you do for others? These are times where we often feel helpless in the course of events, but as another Nobel Prize winner said, When you feel helpless, go help somebody.

Social media is full of groups small and large, exercising their rights to be inspired, to help the arc of the moral universe bend just a little more.