I wrote this on August 28, 2003. Forgive me if you have read it before. Forty years ago this afternoon, a little blond-headed white boy was playing baseball in the afternoon, as was the custom in his neighborhood, with the Vincent kids, the Bruning kids, and the Cogdill kids. All of sudden, his mother yelled out the window for him to come in. Oh, mom! The games still going. Youve got to come in. Send your company home and bring your brother. After a little more whining, the kid followed orders. In he went, but not without a question. Why did we have to come in? I want you to watch something on TV. What? A speech. A speech? I wanna play baseball. I dont wanna watch a speech! This is history being made. You have to watch this speech. So the kid sat down and watched the grainy black-and-white images of the speech on the old round-tubed Muntz TV, grumbling all the while about his ball game that was lost, as this was one of the last games of the summer. He watched. And there was a huge crowd, as documented in Patrik Henry Bass’s 2003 retrospective, Like A Mighty Stream: The March on Washington, August 28, 1963. That book does a remarkable job compiling eyewitness testimony from those who planned and attended the historic event, many taking off from work for a day or two in the middle of the week to ride buses for hours and hours to get there. There were speeches. There were singers. And finally, there was the keynote speaker, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Bass notes that on the morning of August 28, 1963, the streets of D.C. appeared to be like a ghost town. Police officials feared violence. A division of National Guard troops stood by at the ready all day—for an event that had not even one police report of violence. Dr. King was only 34 years old, a Baptist minister from Atlanta, and a veteran of the civil rights movement that had sprung up in Montgomery and Birmingham (read also his Letter from a Birmingham Jail), and had by this time spread to Detroit, St. Louis, and dozens of other cities around the U.S. Now the movement had come to the nations capital (Bass documents the process by which A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Walter Fauntroy, John Lewis, and Roy Wilkins had organized the March, and how John F. Kennedy himself had tried unsuccessfully to talk them out of it). The speech was at hand. The minister had worked on it for 3-4 days before its delivery that Wednesday afternoon, and now the time came. After two hymns by gospel singer Miss Mahalia Jackson, Dr. King was introduced, and he began speaking. Another 2003 book, The Dream, by Eric Hansen, analyzes Dr. Kings actual speech better than any other source Ive ever read. Hansen says that the speech pretty much followed the original script, employing its bad check metaphor for its first ten minutes: And so weve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense, weve come to our nations capital to cash a check. When the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent word of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men--yes, black men as well as white men--would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check; a check which has come back insufficient funds. While that metaphor was strong, bluntly, it was no I Have a Dream. Hansens analysis: As it turned out, the speech King actually delivered at the March on Washington was more indebted to set pieces from his own storehouse of oratory than it was to the prepared text he had brought with him to the podium. King added so much new material to his prepared speech that the length of his address nearly doubled. For about the first ten minutes of the speech, King read his text nearly verbatim, making only slight alterations of word choice or phrasing. Hansen adds that both Andrew Young, later U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and at the time, a young minister who was one of Dr. Kings lieutenants, and Clarence Jones, a New York attorney at whose home Dr. King had begun the speech the weekend before, both said they noticed that he had marked up his copy of the prepared text, crossing out lines and scribbling new ones as he waited for his turn to speak. After that first ten minutes, Hansen says, Dr. King used what they call in preachers school, rabbit in the bushes oratory: if the crowd seems to be responding, keep shooting at the rabbit in the bushes, and hopefully youll hit it. In other words, if they respond, keep giving them what they want. Did Dr. King ever do that! As he departed from his text for about the last seven minutes, Dr. King inserted only one original paragraph and the final Free at Last! idea from the prepared script. The rest of it--all the parts you hear today--Dr. King CREATED AT THE PODIUM. While Dr. King was going through that first ten minutes, before an audience of a quarter-million at the Lincoln Memorial and the Looking Glass, and millions in a national TV audience, he was getting help from Mahalia Jackson. According to Hansen, Ms. Jackson intoned behind Dr. King, Tell em about the dream, Martin.... tell em, Martin, about your dream. Hansen speculates that the preacher didnt hear the singer; who knows? But he told em about the dream. Now, he had used the I have a dream theme in previous speeches. Stump speakers, politicians and preachers, refer to these stock ideas and repeated metaphors as set pieces. In at least three recorded speeches in the nine months before the March, Dr. King had invoked the I Have a Dream idea--in North Carolina at Thanksgiving 1962, before Bull Connors deputies in Birmingham in May 1963, and in Detroit, in June of that year--but in reading the recorded texts of those speeches, they hardly approached the soaring imagery and masterful oratory of the speech in Washington, D.C. That little kid who was called in from the ball game to watch that speech did not exactly appreciate the enormity of what he was seeing. But he knew the speaker was very good; he remarked to his mother how good this speaker was. Needless to say, I was the little kid, approaching my eighth birthday. I still recall the speech. I hope we all still recall the dream. As the exact moment of the 40th anniversary of the speech passed even as I write this, I say thank you to my mother for doing what she did. She was right about history being made. I still get chills when I hear that voice: I say to you, my friends, even though we face the difficulties of today, and tomorrow, I still have a dream. 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: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. 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, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my 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. I have a dream today! I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day, right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and little white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today! .... This will be the day--this will be the day--when all of Gods children will be able to sing with new meaning: My country tis of thee; sweet land of liberty; of thee I sing; land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrims pride; from every mountainside, let freedom ring! And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California. But not only that. Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi, from every mountainside, let freedom ring. And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of Gods 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! Wow! May we all strive to reach the ideals Dr. King set forth. Let that be our homage to him. Peace, my friends! Forty years ago this afternoon, a little blond-headed white boy was playing baseball in the afternoon, as was the custom in his neighborhood, with the Vincent kids, the Bruning kids, and the Cogdill kids. All of sudden, his mother yelled out the window for him to come in. Oh, mom! The games still going. Youve got to come in. Send your company home and bring your brother. After a little more whining, the kid followed orders. In he went, but not without a question. Why did we have to come in? I want you to watch something on TV. What? A speech. A speech? I wanna play baseball. I dont wanna watch a speech! This is history being made. You have to watch this speech. So the kid sat down and watched the grainy black-and-white images of the speech on the old round-tubed Muntz TV, grumbling all the while about his ball game that was lost, as this was one of the last games of the summer. He watched. And there was a huge crowd, as documented in Patrik Henry Bass’s 2003 retrospective, Like A Mighty Stream: The March on Washington, August 28, 1963. That book does a remarkable job compiling eyewitness testimony from those who planned and attended the historic event, many taking off from work for a day or two in the middle of the week to ride buses for hours and hours to get there. There were speeches. There were singers. And finally, there was the keynote speaker, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Bass notes that on the morning of August 28, 1963, the streets of D.C. appeared to be like a ghost town. Police officials feared violence. A division of National Guard troops stood by at the ready all day—for an event that had not even one police report of violence. Dr. King was only 34 years old, a Baptist minister from Atlanta, and a veteran of the civil rights movement that had sprung up in Montgomery and Birmingham (read also his Letter from a Birmingham Jail), and had by this time spread to Detroit, St. Louis, and dozens of other cities around the U.S. Now the movement had come to the nations capital (Bass documents the process by which A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Walter Fauntroy, John Lewis, and Roy Wilkins had organized the March, and how John F. Kennedy himself had tried unsuccessfully to talk them out of it). The speech was at hand. The minister had worked on it for 3-4 days before its delivery that Wednesday afternoon, and now the time came. After two hymns by gospel singer Miss Mahalia Jackson, Dr. King was introduced, and he began speaking. Another 2003 book, The Dream, by Eric Hansen, analyzes Dr. Kings actual speech better than any other source Ive ever read. Hansen says that the speech pretty much followed the original script, employing its bad check metaphor for its first ten minutes: And so weve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense, weve come to our nations capital to cash a check. When the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent word of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men--yes, black men as well as white men--would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check; a check which has come back insufficient funds. While that metaphor was strong, bluntly, it was no I Have a Dream. Hansens analysis: As it turned out, the speech King actually delivered at the March on Washington was more indebted to set pieces from his own storehouse of oratory than it was to the prepared text he had brought with him to the podium. King added so much new material to his prepared speech that the length of his address nearly doubled. For about the first ten minutes of the speech, King read his text nearly verbatim, making only slight alterations of word choice or phrasing. Hansen adds that both Andrew Young, later U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and at the time, a young minister who was one of Dr. Kings lieutenants, and Clarence Jones, a New York attorney at whose home Dr. King had begun the speech the weekend before, both said they noticed that he had marked up his copy of the prepared text, crossing out lines and scribbling new ones as he waited for his turn to speak. After that first ten minutes, Hansen says, Dr. King used what they call in preachers school, rabbit in the bushes oratory: if the crowd seems to be responding, keep shooting at the rabbit in the bushes, and hopefully youll hit it. In other words, if they respond, keep giving them what they want. Did Dr. King ever do that! As he departed from his text for about the last seven minutes, Dr. King inserted only one original paragraph and the final Free at Last! idea from the prepared script. The rest of it--all the parts you hear today--Dr. King CREATED AT THE PODIUM. While Dr. King was going through that first ten minutes, before an audience of a quarter-million at the Lincoln Memorial and the Looking Glass, and millions in a national TV audience, he was getting help from Mahalia Jackson. According to Hansen, Ms. Jackson intoned behind Dr. King, Tell em about the dream, Martin.... tell em, Martin, about your dream. Hansen speculates that the preacher didnt hear the singer; who knows? But did he ever tell em about the dream Now, Dr. King had used the I have a dream theme in previous speeches. Stump speakers, politicians and preachers, refer to these stock ideas and repeated metaphors as set pieces. In at least three recorded speeches in the nine months before the March, Dr. King had invoked the I Have a Dream idea--in North Carolina at Thanksgiving 1962, before Bull Connors deputies in Birmingham in May 1963, and in Detroit, in June of that year--but in reading the recorded texts of those speeches, they hardly approached the soaring imagery and masterful oratory of the speech in Washington, D.C. That little kid who was called in from the ball game to watch that speech did not exactly appreciate the enormity of what he was seeing. But he knew the speaker was very good; and he remarked to his mother how good this speaker was. Needless to say, I was the little kid, approaching my eighth birthday. I still recall the speech. I hope we all still recall the dream. As the exact moment of the 40th anniversary of the speech passed even as I write this, I say thank you to my mother for doing what she did. She was right about history being made. I still get chills when I hear that voice, and when I watch the grainy video, that the minister looks down to his notes only very briefly from 10:53 to the end of the speech. It was amazing for its delivery. It was unmatched in its rhetoric. I say to you, my friends, even though we face the difficulties of today, and tomorrow, I still have a dream. 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: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. 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, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my 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. I have a dream today! I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day, right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and little white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today! .... This will be the day--this will be the day--when all of Gods children will be able to sing with new meaning: My country tis of thee; sweet land of liberty; of thee I sing; land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrims pride; from every mountainside, let freedom ring! And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California. But not only that. Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi, from every mountainside, let freedom ring. And when this happens, when we allow freedom [to ring], when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of Gods 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! Wow! May we all, even all these many years later, strive to reach the ideals Dr. King set forth. May that be our homage to him. Peace, my friends! https://youtube/watch?v=zZwmoVYEwV4
Posted on: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 20:40:19 +0000
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