Bus seats, restaurant counters, restrooms, drinking fountains.
I can just remember the black and white images on my family's old console television. The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. The marchers, the attack dogs straining at their leashes, teeth bared in vicious snarls. The water hoses knocking people to the street. The cops stomping and brutally kicking people on the ground, trying to cover their heads. The people shouting at the marchers. The look of insane fury and hatred in their faces.
The riots. Cities burning in the night. I was 10 years old when the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered. It was all adult stuff, and didn't really affect my kid's world of bullies and victims (I was one of the latter). But I could hear the tension in my parents' voices. And although I didn't understand it at the time, I felt that something incredibly wrong was taking place.
But to say those images had no affect on me is not correct. They helped to foster my mistrust of authority, my contempt for humanity.
Today we take a moment to honor this man. Nobel laureate, pastor, activist, humanitarian, leader of the Civil Rights Movement, receiver of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. We recall his words and deeds with parades and speeches. But as I look around, I can only note how little has changed. The police still beating people down, the dogs still straining at their leashes, and the look of insane rage and hatred still in the faces of people.
Of all King's achievements, he may be best remembered for his "I Have a Dream" speech. On a sultry, Wednesday afternoon in August 1963, he spoke before an audience of 250,000 people at the "March on Washington."
"Let freedom ring. And when this happens, and 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 God's 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!"
And the bells did ring. Not for freedom, because we have not achieved that yet, but for the man who had the courage to stand up and say that a man should not be judged by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character.
His voice rang out to those who stood in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial and across the National Mall to the steps of the Capitol itself. He spoke of Mr. Lincoln with a timbre and a resonance and a cadence that fired the conscience of a nation. He reminded us that the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation was a promissory note, and that five score years later, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds.
He spoke these words in a time when lynchings were a way of life. When in many states blacks could not vote or had to pay a "poll tax" to exercise their rights. A time when people of color could not gain lodgings in the motels along our highways. A time when segregation lived more in the hearts of men than in the streets of our cities.
President John F. Kennedy was so worried about what King might say, or the reaction of the crowd, that he had a Secret Service agent positioned by the podium ready to literally pull the plug.
Instead, Dr. King called those in attendance the veterans of creative suffering. He spoke in parables and metaphors, invoking scripture, the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, the Constitution, and lines from "My Country Tis of Thee."
He admonished the gathering that "we can never be satisfied" until justice and freedom were the law of the land. The deep spirituality and rousing patriotism of the 17 minute sermon appealed to the mind of reason, inflamed the heart of brotherhood, and sent soaring the soul of righteousness.
I still mistrust authority, and my contempt for humanity remains unabated.
But if Dr. King stood for anything, it would be to tell me that peace and love, brotherhood and good will, will eventually triumph.
And until that time, we must continue to march.
To watch the speech in full (and every American should), please visit:
