Inspired by a dream of equality What I saw at the March on Washington 50 years ago Comments (1) NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Wednesday, August 28, 2013, 4:20 AM. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. acknowledges the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial for his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963. I never intended to join the March on Washington 50 years ago. None of my friends planned to go. Much of the white press feared the event would invite violence. Civil-rights activists fretted that an incident would damage the cause. Congress was on edge. President John F. Kennedy had several thousand troops, unseen, on standby. The authorities were primed to cut off the sound system if there was incitement by hell-raisers. Yet the closer we came to the day, the more I felt I had to join those who were answering the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s summons to a mass celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. At the last moment, I called dear relatives in D.C., David and Nan Robinson, and begged a bed. “Sure, by all means” was their answer. “You’re the 19th person who’s called with a similar request.” Just out of law school, I was glad to sleep on their sofa. In the morning, I caught a bus to an assembly point for marchers — and got lucky. I stepped off the bus into a group of men and women, got mixed up with them and found that I was on a special bus being taken swiftly through the hurrying throngs. I was in the company of stars: Burt Lancaster and Harry Belafonte, Charlton Heston and Marlon Brando, Diahann Carroll, Sammy Davis Jr. and other celebrities who’d jetted in from Los Angeles. In their entourage, I climbed all the way to the podium, never once asking the question that I should have been asked: Who the hell was I? The answer was that I was a young Canadian immigrant who had chosen America, and here I was 50 feet from King as he was about to give a speech for the ages. Close by were icons of the civil rights movement. There was A. Philip Randolph, who had unionized America’s railroad porters in the 1930s, pressured President Harry Truman to end segregation in the military in the ’40s and conceived of the great march in the ’60s. There was John Lewis, who had been beaten and jailed in the nonviolent Freedom Rides for equal legal and voting rights, and who is today a Georgia congressman. And there was gospel singer Mahalia Jackson! She gave the greatest performance of any entertainer I’ve ever witnessed. In her unique style, she brought the emotions of the mass audience to a single point of light as they chanted King’s name. Then, as he spoke, Jackson called out, “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin!” He’d been alluding to his dream off and on that summer, and now he soared with history-making power. Who could not help but be exalted by the poetry of King’s rhetoric as he began sentence after sentence with the phrase “I have a dream.” A dream, he said, in which everybody would “sit down together at a table of brotherhood.” He talked of his hope and faith, that with this faith we would all be able to “hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope” and transform “the jangling discourse of our nation to a beautiful symphony of brotherhood” such that our children will “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Read more: nydailynews/opinion/inspired-dream-equality-article-1.1438600#ixzz2dLbply8t
Posted on: Thu, 29 Aug 2013 09:12:51 +0000
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