Gary Younge talking:
I guess the first thing to know is that it wasn’t as though most Americans at that time were in love with the speech, or even the March on Washington, that the March on Washington polls show was not a popular thing to be doing. Most white Americans certainly believed that the push to civil rights was moving too fast. And in that moment, civil rights as a concept, integration as a concept, was still somewhat controversial, and how America got there was not a foregone conclusion. And I think today the way the speech and the march is understand is wrapped in the flag and seen as one more example of American genius, when in fact it was a mass, multiracial, dissident—dissident act.
And just a couple of examples of things that took place around that time to show that people really—the powers that be really didn’t want this to happen, Kennedy tried to talk them out of the march. The march was policed like a military operation, literally—it was called Operation Steep Hill. And they had boxcars and helicopters ready to go. They stopped all elective surgery in Washington that weekend. They stopped the sale of alcohol, no baseball games, and said that the courts were going to run all night, thinking that there would be a large number of arrests, which there weren’t. But also, quite suddenly, on the day, the sound system had been tampered with by the Justice Department, and they had put a kill switch, because they feared that someone would take to the mic and call for mass insurrection—clearly not really listening to anything the civil rights leaders had been saying over the previous year. And if that were to take place, then the plan was to effect the kill switch, kill the mic and play a record of Mahalia Jackson singing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”
I think there were two reasons why this speech became iconic. The first is that after ’63 King gets the Nobel Peace Prize, he’s the Man of the Year on Time, I think, but then his star begins to wane as he starts talking about class and poverty and government intervention to address issues of poverty. People say, “You know, you’re stepping off the reservation here. You stick to what you know, which is race and civil rights.” Then he starts to talk about Vietnam, and he opposes the Vietnam War, and after that, everything really gets tough for him. His unfavorability ratings, twice as many Americans have an unfavorable view of him than a favorable one. And if you think of how favorable African Americans viewed, then that’s a whole lot of white people at that time that really think he’s not a great guy. And then he’s assassinated.
How do we remember this man then? And they did try to forget him, but they can’t forget him, so how do we remember him? Well, we can’t remember him as the man—nationally, as a national figure. He can’t be remembered as the man who said that America was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” because, arguably, America still is, and that issue has not been resolved. They can’t remember him as the man who railed against poverty and for further government intervention, because we’re still having that argument. So, none of those things raise him above the fray; they actually insert him into it. But they can remember him as the man who gave the most eloquent articulation of this superb moral moment in America’s history, I argue the last great moral act that America has achieved which is still a consensus, which is the end of segregation. And the end of segregation, this is the speech—it doesn’t—it’s not the speech that ends segregation, but as Andrew Young said when I interviewed him for the book, he said, “Imagine somebody got in Egypt a couple years ago and managed, in a 15-minute speech, to articulate what the Arab Spring was all about.” Americans didn’t understand it. King explained it. And we have it to listen to. And that’s really part of his power.
I think the other thing that it does is it—there was enough in the speech for everybody. It’s a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. It starts in the shadow of Lincoln and ends with a Negro spiritual and pays homage to the Founding Fathers and the Constitution. You don’t get much more patriotic than that, if patriotism is what you’re after. It’s delivered in the black vernacular on this brilliant day at the March on Washington. Progressives love it. And conservatives usually take one line, “that my children will be judged, not by the color of their skin, by the content of their character,” and they use that one line. I’ve seen Glenn Beck do it, Ronald Reagan do it, opponents of affirmative action do it. They take that one line to say, “Here you go. Let’s ignore the legacy of racism. Let’s pretend to be colorblind. And let’s assume that racism is over, that the way to understand racism is to ignore its legacy.” So, depending on what you want to misunderstand or understand, there is something in that speech for everybody.
the dream segment is not in the text of the speech. The night before, he’s casting around, looking for ideas, and Wyatt Tee Walker, one of his main aides, says, “Don’t do the ‘I have a dream’ thing. It’s trite. It’s cliché. You’ve used it many times before.” And King was aiming for a Gettysburg-type address. And he had indeed used the speech—that refrain many times before. That year alone, he had delivered 350 speeches, or around that. He’s not delivering a new speech each time. And he’s a preacher. Clarence Jones, when I interviewed him, he said he had this ability to cut and paste, even as he’s speaking, and, in the American Baptist tradition, to draw on the mood and the response of the crowd. And that’s what he’s doing. So, he umms and ahs about whether he’s going to put it in it. He decides to leave it out. It’s not in the text.
When he gets to the podium, for the most part he’s quite faithful to the text. And if you listen to the speech—and I think it’s the most loved, least well-known speech that I can think of, so most people, they say they love it, but they’ve rarely listened to it. And I advise your viewers and listeners, just take 15 minutes out of your life in the next four or five days and give the speech a listen. If you listen to the speech, he’s winding down: “Go back to Mississippi. Go back to South Carolina.” And behind him is Mahalia Jackson, his favorite gospel singer. He used to call Mahalia Jackson when he was down and on the road and ask her to sing to him, so they had a very intimate connection. Mahalia Jackson shouts, “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” because she had heard him give that speech in Detroit a few months earlier. King continues. Mahalia Jackson shouts again, “Tell them about the dream!” And then, just about that time, King—in the words of Clarence Jones, he puts the text to his left, and Clarence Jones says, in his body language, he shifted from a lecturer to a preacher. And then Jones turned to the person standing next to him and said, “Those people don’t know it, but they’re about to go to church.” And then King starts on his “I have a dream” refrain.
Now, we don’t know for sure whether King heard Mahalia Jackson, though Clarence Jones said he must have done, because he heard [her] and he was 20 feet from both of them. King has never said that he did, but we do know that she said it, and we do know that around the time that she said it, that is the direction that he took the speech. And it’s within the tradition of the Baptist Church, a sermon or a speech is crafted—it’s drafted by the preacher, but then it’s crafted as you go along in response, call and response, to the crowd. And this was definitely not in the words that was written before him at the time.
William Jones talking:
the roots of the march really go back 20 years earlier to a march that A. Philip Randolph called and then canceled at the last minute in 1941. The purpose of that march was to protest employment discrimination in the defense industries and also segregation and discrimination in the armed forces. This was actually the point before the U.S. actually entered the war. But President Roosevelt had called on the United States not to enter the war directly, but to serve as what he called an “arsenal of democracy.” And what he meant by that was that the U.S. had a special role in protecting democracy by providing weapons, equipment for the Allied governments in Europe and in Asia. And as part of that call to become an arsenal of democracy, President Roosevelt promised that in exchange for supporting the war effort, Americans could expect a more robust sense of social citizenship and economic citizenship. He famously said that Americans should be rewarded with what he called the four freedoms, which included a guarantee of a decent standard of living, decent wages, decent work.
A. Philip Randolph and many other black leaders said, well, this is a great ideal, and we support this ideal of the arsenal of democracy and the four freedoms, but African Americans were almost completely shut out of jobs in the defense industries. And it’s important to remember that this was a moment when the mobilization for the war had really ended the Great Depression for many Americans. These were—this was the first time in which many working-class Americans in over a decade had access to decent paid, often unionized, jobs. These were jobs that the union movement rose very quickly in. And so, a number of civil rights activists, including A. Philip Randolph, said, “We really need—this is really a critical issue that we need to confront.” And they called on Roosevelt to ensure that African Americans could have access to these jobs. They also pointed to the fact that African Americans were being drafted into essentially a Jim Crow army. They were being forced to serve in an army that segregated them, excluded them from any officer positions. And so, they put a great deal of pressure on Roosevelt.
And Roosevelt really refused to deal with them at all. He just completely ignored their complaints—until this idea of a march on Washington emerged in 1941. It emerged at a mass meeting in Chicago, where A. Philip Randolph was the speaker, and was proposed by an anonymous black woman. We don’t know who she was, but she stood from the floor and proposed a march on Washington. Randolph really liked this idea, and he took it up. And by the spring of 1941, he estimated that 100,000 people were going to join him in meeting at the Capitol building and marching down Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House, past the War Department, which had not yet moved into the Pentagon, and ending, symbolically, at the Lincoln Memorial, where there would be a mass rally. And I think, you know, many of—all the listeners will recognize that this really formed the basis for the march that was called in 1963.
The 1941 march was called off because, at the very last minute, President Roosevelt finally relented. He called Randolph and other leaders to the White House, and he agreed to issue an executive order banning discrimination by defense contractors. This was not their whole demand, but A. Philip Randolph and many others considered this the most important demand. This executive order at the time was extremely important. It was compared, actually, to the Emancipation Proclamation as the first time since Reconstruction that the federal government had really intervened in a decisive way on behalf of African Americans.
this victory really established A. Philip Randolph as the primary leader of the civil rights movement that would emerge in the postwar period. It also set off, in many ways framed the goals of that movement as this connection between, on one hand, attacking legal segregation, demanding legal equality, but then also insisting that none of that would be effective without access to decent paid job, without economic security. So the connection between economic justice and civil rights was really there from the beginning. And A. Philip Randolph was really there from the beginning and would emerge and remain at the center of the leadership. He was known as the “dean of black leadership” up until the—through the 1960s.
one of the things that has gotten very little attention is the role of the press in stirring up hysteria to that—against that 1941 march. The Washington Post began a series of articles in the weeks before the march about crimes, a crime wave in Washington, D.C., obviously focused on African Americans, while the black press was the main instrument of mobilizing people to Washington.
in the ’63 march the response from the White House, which is really alarm, the concern that having this many people—this many black people in Washington was inevitably going to lead to violence, to riots, and the idea that this was really a national emergency. The executive order that A. Philip Randolph called and—issued in 1941 was explicitly an emergency war order saying that ensuring equal access to these jobs, we need enough people to work in these plants, was essential to the mobilization for the military effort.
And so, there was this sort of military response that we saw again in 1963. If you look at the press coverage of the march leading up to the march, the headlines are all, you know, “Washington Gets Jittery over the March,” “Washington Is Preparing for an Assault,” the reports of the—as Gary talked about, the troops being staged across the river, on alert, ready to be flown in at the last minute, emptying the city jails. So this was really seen as, one reporter called it, a siege on the city.
I think one thing that’s really remarkable is the really dramatic shift just before and after the 1963 march, where after the march the press is sort of ecstatic at the fact that there wasn’t violence, that this was a successful march. And I think that actually—that really, I think, accounts for some of the power that the march had, the fear and then the sense of relief.
there was a considerable controversy over Randolph’s decision to cancel the march. He accepted really half the demands, which was an end to discrimination in the defense industries. The executive order did nothing to address segregation and discrimination in the armed forces. The executive order was also extremely weak in two ways. The president provided very little money to actually enforce this issue, and, really, enforcement depended on the ability of civil rights activists to mobilize around hearings, to mobilize mass marches, to pressure defense contractors to live up to the executive order. So it was really more of a moral statement than a legal statement. The executive order also expired at the end of the war. So, immediately, people sort of wondered, how are we going to get something really substantial out of this?
the most vocal critics of Randolph at the time were Adam Clayton Powell, who at the time was a young minister—he would later become a congressman from New York—and Richard Parrish, who was the leader of a black student organization in New York City that endorsed the march and did a lot of mobilization for the march, and he was really upset that he felt that Randolph had sort of unilaterally cancelled the march without consulting people who had put a lot of time and investment in it.
Gary Younge talking:
Malcolm X was in D.C., and he was not at the march. He kind of—the night before, in particular, he kind of prowled the lobby of the Statler Hotel, I think—it may have been the Willard Hotel, but one of those two hotels—and he called it the “farce on Washington.” And he was kind of mocking people, kind of somewhat gently, but saying, you know, “You’re all going to this picnic. It’s going to be, you know, a big—it’s going to be a big waste of time,” talking to lots of reporters, and really kind of having quite a good time poking fun of the whole thing. But then, that night, Ossie Davis says, the night before the March, Malcolm X goes to his room, his hotel room, and says to him, “Regardless of what I’ve said, I’m there. If you need me, I’m going to be here. And call me,” and by which I think he was referring to, and certainly Ossie Davis understood it this way, if there is violence, then it could be that my voice may be able to quell some of the more militant elements in a way that King’s may not.
But there are two good things that come out of that that I think are quite important, because of the manner in which—the flawed manner, I think, in which King and Malcolm X are juxtaposed—one meek and mild, the other one bold and defiant. It was King that year who went to jail. It was King who led the protests. It was King who really put his life on the line that year, in a way that, I would argue, Malcolm X did not. So King was a militant. There’s no doubt about that. And he was an uncompromising, in many ways, an uncompromising activist. Malcolm X, on the other hand, is portrayed as this firebrand who only knows black and white. And in that interchange with Ossie Davis, in the fact that he’s in D.C. but not at the march, you see that he’s far more strategic than people give him credit for. Malcolm X understands that the March on Washington, if it fails on its own terms, that’s bad for everybody. Even if he doesn’t agree with its central demand of integration, he understands that it can’t be seen to fail, and that if it succeeds, it succeeds for all black people—so, a far more complex character, actually, than people give him credit for.
speech is known as the “I Have a Dream” speech and, for example, not the “Bad Check” speech. And that metaphor comes from a moment in Birmingham when a large number of young kids, some as young as six, are in jail for protesting, and a segregationist judge raises the bail money, and the SCLC, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, don’t have the money. Via Harry Belafonte, Clarence Jones gets a call from Rockefeller, the New York governor, I think, at the time, Nelson Rockefeller. And he goes to his bank vault, and there’s Clarence Jones, Rockefeller, a bank functionary and a security guard. He hands over a huge amount of cash, and he says, “You must sign this promissory note.” And Clarence Jones says, “I don’t have that money. We don’t have that money.” He says, “No, you’ve got to sign it to take it out of the vault. Everything’s going to be fine.” Clarence Jones signs it, takes the money down to Birmingham, the kids are bailed out. He comes back to New York. A messenger comes, and on the promissory note it’s stamped “paid.” And Clarence Jones gets to thinking, where there’s a will, America could do this. America has the money. It has the resources. It’s the most powerful country in the world. If America wanted to make this happen, if the political culture wanted to make this happen, it would happen. There are the means; there is not the will. And so, he writes this refrain, which King sticks to very faithfully.
What’s interesting about that is that the dream segment—which I do love, because I think that it’s important to dream. I think it’s important. King could have gotten up there and said, “I have a 10-point plan for how we get from here to somewhere else in, you know, the most reasonable manner.” But he didn’t. He stands in the middle of the most vile racism, and he dreams of a world where racism no longer exists. And I think it’s very important for progressives to have those dreams, to keep in mind—we talk about immigration reform—this dream of a land with no borders, for example. And so, I like that section. But it allows people to step out of the now and to get very airy-fairy about it.
And what the cashed check does, or the bad check, is it brings it back to brass tacks and says, “Look, we have to make good on the promise of this nation.” And there is—when people ask—you know, it’s one of the least interesting questions about the speech, I think, is, “Do you think his dream’s been realized?” And I think the likelihood that King would come back, look at our jails, look at our schools, look at Congress, and say, “My work here was done,” is very unlikely. That check is still a bad check, and it still needs to be—it still needs to be honored. And so, in many ways, it brings those issues back to light.
Black unemployment is still twice the rate of white unemployment, as it was in ’63. The disparities in median income, still very similar. Look around at Trayvon Martin or the Zimmerman case, look at the attempt to gut the Civil Rights Act, and you can see ways in which this moment and the victories of this moment are being shelled out and being gutted and how the history of that moment is being rewritten, not as a victory against codified segregation, which it was, but as a victory against racism as though racism is something of the past, not a live, real thing, but a discrete, historical moment that America has actually overcome, which clearly it hasn’t. And in that nature, the speech is not—is misunderstood as an artifact instead of what it is, which is a living, breathing document that still speaks to the realities of today.
The first is to rescue this speech and this moment from those who would argue that this is just one more example of America’s relentless move towards progress. Large numbers of people—the majority of Americans, in fact—did not want this march or this speech to happen. It was a mass act of dissidence, one that spoke to people around—around the world. I was born and raised in Britain. My parents are from Barbados. I knew about the speech as a young child and heard it at school in England at the age of 12 or 13. This is a world speech.
This is America’s favorite speech, alongside the Gettysburg Address, was delivered by a black man, a preacher, who was calling for racial equality and who was assassinated for making those demands. That is, in a sense, is the achievement.
– source democracynow.org
Gary Younge, author, broadcaster and award-winning columnist for The Guardian and The Nation. His book, The Speech: The Story Behind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Dream, has just been published. His previous books include No Place Like Home: A Black Briton’s Journey Through the American South, Who Are We—And Should It Matter in the 21st Century? and Stranger in a Strange Land: Encounters in the Disunited States.
William P. Jones, professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison specializing in civil rights and labor history. His new book is The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights. He’s also the author of The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South. His recent article for Dissent magazine is “The Forgotten Radical History of the March on Washington.”