Wednesday 28 August 2013 marked the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. More than two hundred thousand people stood before the memorial to President Abraham Lincoln, whose Emancipation Proclamation had taken effect 100 years before, on 1 January 1863. The stirring address by Martin Luther King Jr has stood the test of time, and is one of the few historic speeches from which many people know at least a few words.
King’s autobiography (see edition edited by Claybourne Carson; 2012 reprint by Intellectual Properties Management, Inc, in association with Abacus) confirms that he had written part of the speech in New York, then arrived in Washington the night before the march, where he worked in his hotel until 4am on completing it. However, the most famous portion of the speech, the ‘I Have a Dream’ section, was extempore. King had used the phrase ‘I Have a Dream’ on a number of previous occasions, including in a speech he had given in Cobo Hall, Detroit, Michigan. But his decision to use the words that day was spontaneous: ‘I started out reading the speech, and read it down to a point. The audience’s response was wonderful that day, and all of a sudden this thing came to me.’ King had been born in Atlanta, Georgia, so the direct references to his home state were particularly poignant: ‘I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.’ He added, later: ‘Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.’
King thought that the events of the summer of 1963, of which the Washington March was the climax, produced not only a change of priorities in President Kennedy’s administration, to elevate civil rights in importance, but also a renewed resolve to ensure that measures were passed into law. Kennedy was tragically assassinated three months later, but his successor, President Johnson, pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In October 1964, King received the Nobel Peace Prize.
King himself was assassinated at the Loraine Hotel, Memphis, Tennessee in April 1968. Single speeches rarely change history in themselves. But there was a significance to the defining phrase King used. If Lincoln had declared slaves free, why, a century later, was an African-American civil rights leader seeing true equality as a ‘dream’ for the future?
And that, in a nutshell, is the message that King’s speech holds for America in 2013. In Texas, on 26 June, when a black woman, Kimberly McCarthy, was executed, her attorney had argued there was a racial bias in jury selection. On 13 July, George Zimmerman was acquitted of murder and manslaughter for the shooting of black teenager Trayvon Martin by a six-member jury, five of whom were white, sparking protest in American cities. Thus, the issue of race itself was once again prominent on the American political agenda. That all children are ‘not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character’ should not be a ‘dream’ for any part of America. It should be a reality.
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Nick Thomas-Symonds is the author of Attlee: A Life in Politics published by IB Tauris (2010). He writes the Labour history column for Progress tweets @NThomasSymonds
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