Martin Luther King Jr.: The Man, The March, the Dream

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Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech is the most famous portion of the August 28, 1963, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. But King’s speech was less heralded during the balance of his own lifetime than it has become since his death by assassination on April 4, 1968. Exploring how and why the fame of ‘I Have a Dream’ is almost entirely posthumous allows us now, 40 years later, to understand better just how different King’s oration looked from inside the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s than it does to many Americans today.

The idea of a 1963 March on Washington was not originally Martin Luther King’s; instead it was A. Philip Randolph, a longtime trade union activist and the senior statesman among African-American civil rights leaders, who first suggested such an event early that year. Indeed, Randolph had planned a similar mass descent upon Washington two decades earlier, in 1941, before canceling the demonstration after President Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed to stronger federal anti-discrimination policies.

What Randolph envisioned in early 1963 was a two-day gathering aimed at drawing attention to ‘the economic subordination of the American Negro.’ As sketched out by Randolph’s close aide Bayard Rustin, ‘a broad and fundamental program of economic justice’ and in particular ‘the creation of more jobs for all Americans’ would be the March’s substantive goal. ‘Integration in the fields of education, housing, transportation and public accommodations’ — at that time the Civil Rights Movement’s most visible aims — ‘will be of limited extent and duration so long as fundamental economic inequality along racial lines persists,’ Rustin asserted.

Randolph and Rustin imagined as many as 100,000 protesters besieging Congress on one day in May and then a public mass rally the following day. As weeks went by in early 1963, their target date shifted to mid-June, then October, but neither of the two largest civil rights groups — the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), headed by the sometimes cautious Roy Wilkins, and the National Urban League (NUL), led by Whitney Young — offered support or encouragement when informed of Randolph’s plan.

Martin Luther King Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) were too busy and preoccupied during the early months of 1963 with planning a major upcoming protest campaign in Birmingham, Ala., to react in any fashion to Randolph’s incipient idea. SCLC’s Birmingham demonstrations got underway in earnest in April 1963, but more than four weeks went by before those protests climaxed with internationally distributed scenes of Birmingham policemen and firemen letting loose with snarling German shepherds and high-powered fire hoses against African-American marchers and onlookers. SCLC’s Birmingham campaign was aimed at winning desegregated facilities and new job opportunities in the city’s downtown department stores, but Birmingham’s vituperatively racist public safety commissioner, Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor, was committed to doing everything he could to obstruct any possible negotiated accord between the downtown business community and the African-American protesters. Up until May of 1963, President John F. Kennedy’s administration had sought to keep civil rights issues on the back burner, notwithstanding violent flare-ups when Southern segregationists had attacked ‘Freedom Riders’ seeking to desegregate interstate buses in May 1961 and federal officials implementing court-ordered integration of the University of Mississippi in October 1962.

The Birmingham protests, however, drew the Kennedy administration into daily, face-to-face attempts to arrange a truce in a local crisis that had rapidly spiraled into a major national news story and then an international embarrassment to the United States. A negotiated accord ending Birmingham’s mass protest marches eventually was reached, but furious segregationists sought to derail the settlement with terror bombings and other acts of retaliation.

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Tags: African American History, American History, Historical Figures, Social History

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