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A black and white photo of MLK Jr speaking at the March on Washington. Behind him, orange faded text with his I Have A Dream speech. (Graphic by Lissa Deonarain)
On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28th 1963, at the March on Washington, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered one of the most famous speeches of all time. But it nearly didn’t happen. On this special edition of Making Contact, Gary Younge, author of The Speech: The Story Behind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Dream, talks about Martin Luther King Junior’s “Dream” and the story behind it. Special thanks to the New School for the recording.
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TRANSCRIPT
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George Lavender: I’m George Lavender and this is Making Contact.
Martin Luther King Jr. [Clip]: “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.”
[Radio static]
George Lavender: It is one of the most famous speeches of all time and it nearly didn’t happen.
Gary Younge: Wyatt T. Walker says to King. “Don’t do the I have a dream thing. It’s trite. It’s a cliche. You’ve used it too many times before,”
George Lavender: But on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28th, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. ignored that advice in front of what was then the largest civil rights demonstration the Capitol had ever seen. He did the I Have a Dream thing
Martin Luther King Jr. [Clip]: “…and black girls. We’ll be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers, I have a dream today!”
George Lavender: On this edition of Making Contact, Gary Younge talks about his book, The Speech, Martin Luther King Jr’s Dream, and the story behind it.
Gary Younge: This, the book is called The Speech and it’s about King’s famous speech at the March on Washington. And if left there as an idea, then you have a great man and a great talk, but King could not do that on its own.
The speech in the march came from somewhere. I wanna start by giving some context to that text, because in the absence of that, there would’ve been no March and there would’ve been no speech.
[Revolution” by Nina Simone plays]
Gary Younge: And so I start with kind of some of the people whose names perhaps we don’t know, but who paid for that speech in a, in a range of ways. I begin with Franklin McCain who was a 17-year-old in Greensboro, North Carolina, who made his stand by taking his seat at the Woolworths downtown on February 1st 1960.
When I interviewed Franklin McCain, he said that up until that time, as a young man in North Carolina, he felt that his life was worthless and that his parents had lied to him. And the lie that they told him was a great American lie: that you can be anything you want to be. He said as he grew through adolescence, he knew that wasn’t true as a 17-year-old Black male in North Carolina. He knew that that wasn’t true.
And just as a symbol of how untrue that was a completely different story that I was doing. Several years later, I interviewed a guy called Buford Posey from Mississippi, a white guy who became an anti-racist, who told me quite matter-of-factly, he said, “I never knew that it was illegal to kill a Black man until I joined the army.”
He said until that time I knew it was wrong, but I didn’t know it was illegal. And true enough, in Mississippi, the people who were as likely as not to be killing Black people were actually the law enforcement agency. So it was not an entirely incredible thing for him to think.
So we go back to Franklin McCain. He knows this as well as Beaufort Posey does. And he says he was angry at his parents for this lie. So they set up, him and his friends, late into the night, January 31st, talking about how everybody had failed them before they talked themselves into the action that they took the following day — not knowing when they showed up at Woolworths in Greensboro, whether any of the others would be there.
He says, “We wanted to go beyond what our parents had done, and the worst thing that could happen was that the Klan could kill us, but I had no concern for my personal safety. The day I sat at that counter, I had the most tremendous feeling of elation and celebration. I felt that in this life, nothing else mattered. If there’s a heaven, I got there for a few minutes. I just felt, you can’t touch me. You can’t hurt me. There’s no other experience like it. Not even the birth of my first child.”
A few years later in May ’63 in Birmingham, Alabama, a bur white police officer attempted to intimidate some Black schoolchildren to keep them from joining the growing anti-segregation protests. They assured him they knew what they were doing, ignored his entreaties, and continued their march toward Kelly Ingram Park where they were arrested.
A reporter asked one of them her age, six, she said, and she climbed into the paddy wagon. The following month in Mississippi, Stalwart Civil Rights campaign of Fannie Lou Hamer overheard Annell Ponder, a fellow activist, being beaten in jail in an adjacent cell.
“Can you say, ‘Yes, sir’, nigger? Can you say, ‘Yes, sir’?, the policeman demanded. “Yes, I can,” replied Ponder. “So say it.” [said the police]. “I don’t know you well enough,” said Ponder, and then Hamer heard her head hit the floor again.
The Polish journalist Rizza Kozinski once wrote “All books about all revolutions begin with a chapter that describes the decay of tottering authority, or the misery and sufferings of the people. But they should begin with a psychological chapter one that shows how a harassed, terrified man suddenly breaks his terror and stops being afraid. This unusual process demands illuminating man, gets rid of fear and feels free.”
The period preceding King’s speech of the March on Washington was one such chapter. Until that point. There had of course, been many fearless acts by anti-racist protesters, but in that moment, the number who were prepared to commit them reached a critical mass. In May ’63, the New York Times published more stories about civil rights in two weeks than it had in the previous two years.
During the 10 week period following Kennedy’s address on civil rights in June that year, there were 758 demonstrations in 186 cities resulting in 14,733 arrests such when the conditions are made to March on Washington possible — and King’s speech so resonant.
And this context was global. Two days after McCain made his protest in Greensboro, the British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan, addressed the South African Parliament in Cape Town with an ominous warning.
Harold MacMillan [Audio Clip]: “The wind of change is blowing through this continent, and whether we like it or not. This growth of national consciousness is a political fact.”
Gary Younge: Some, including his immediate audience — apartheid Parliament — didn’t like it at all, but as a decade wore on, that wind became a gale. In the three years between MacMillan’s speech and the March on Washington, the following countries became independent: Togo, Mali, Senegal, Zare, Somalia, Benin, Niger, Burkina Faso, Cotes d’Ivoire, Chad, Central African Republic. Congo, Gabon, Nigeria, Mauritania, Sierra Leone, Tanganyika, and Jamaica. Internationally, non-racial democracy and the Black enfranchisement that came with it with the order of the day. The longer America practiced legal segregation, the more it looked like a slum on the wrong side of history than a shining city on the hill.
Now the story of that year in particular is the story of the base, the masses, the grassroots, continually running ahead of the leadership. King spoke in Harlem just a few months before the march and was heckled by protestors, shouting, “We want Malcolm.” When the NAACP hold their conference in Chicago, they invite Mayor Daley to give introductory remarks and he is heckled from the floor.
When their leaders go to speak to Kennedy about holding the march, Kennedy says to them, “We have legislation that’s currently going through Congress. We would rather have new laws than have the Negroes out on the streets.” And Philip Randolph, the Socialist and Trade Union organizer, who’s primarily responsible for calling the March, tells Kennedy: “The Negroes are already in the streets, Mr. President and I doubt if you called them that they would come back.”
That is the mood of the moment that the patience has worn out; the forbearance, the ability to withstand the clubs and the hoses — hoses that can fire so strong they can knock the bark off a tree at 30 feet, being fired at children and dogs — has become too much.
And so African Americans — who are always fighting back — start to resist. In Birmingham, eventually they respond to the bombings of the Klan with violence. And there’s a fear, both among the Civil rights leadership and among the Kennedy administration, that Black people will resist and will meet like with like.
That is the mood that creates a necessity for a march, which is called at the beginning of the year but very few people want. The poll show that most Americans don’t want it, and particularly most white Americans don’t want it. Kennedy doesn’t want it. It’s insufficiently radical for many of the youth and too radical for many of the more conservative leadership.
But by the time it happens, there is a sense that if they don’t do this, then what are they gonna do to channel this this mass frustration? So the march happens. Now, the key fear, primarily of the state, is that there will be violence. This is peculiar because most of the violence in the South has come from the white segregationists, not from African Americans. But nonetheless, the fear is that there will be violence.
And so it is literally policed as a military operation. It’s called Operation Steep Hill. 82nd Airborne, ready to fly up from North Carolina at a moment’s notice and dropped 19,000 troops on DC. 1,000 troops in DC deployed, 6,000 police working. All leave canceled. All elective surgery, canceled. Baseball game, canceled. Alcohol sales are made illegal.
And even on the mic, the mic that King speaks from, there is a kill switch that the Justice Department put in surreptitiously. The idea is that if anybody calls for insurrection from the stage, that they will flip the switch and play Mahalia Jackson singing “He’s Got the Whole World In His Hands.” That’s their response.
And into that atmosphere that King plans his address. Now, King gave around 350 speeches that year. You take time off for high days and holidays, that’s about a speech a day. And generally, he’s not giving a bespoke speech. He’s an African American Baptist preacher, and in that tradition, he drafts his sermon, but then he crafts it in response to how the audience is taking to what he’s saying.
And he has a number of arsenal, a kind of a series of weapons that he can use rhetorical weapons. But the difference is that this speech, unlike other speeches, is gonna be televised. If you were in the Black church or the Civil Rights Movement, you’d heard King speak before, but if you weren’t, this was his oral introduction to the nation.
Kennedy had never heard him give a speech before, and at the end of the speech, he turns to one of his aides in the Oval Office and says, “Damn, he’s good.” So King and his team want something that is gonna be on a par with Gettysburg. Now, we know a lot of these details because the FBI were kind enough to record them for us.
He wants something on a par with Gettysburg. And so one of his main aides, Wyatt T. Walker says to King, “Don’t do the ‘I Have A Dream’ thing. It’s trite. It’s a cliché. You’ve used it too many times before.” That’s the first line of the book. And indeed, King had used it many times before.
He first recorded using of it was in 62. He thought that he probably used it in 61. That’s a couple of years before. He’d used it in June at a rally in Detroit and even a week earlier, at a fundraiser for Black insurance executives in Chicago. So this was not the first time by a long stretch, that he had used the I Have A Dream refrain.
King worries away at this speech. He seeks counsel. He has a lot of input, much more than he would generally, and what we know is that when he goes to bed at 4:00 in the morning, the morning of the march, I Have A Dream is not in the text of the speech. That we know. According to Clarence Jones, his lawyer and his speech writer, it was not in King’s mind to to do that the next day.
So the next day there is a series of meetings they have with Congress. There’s a funny kind of moment at the beginning of the day where they’re in meeting Congress and they come out, and the marches started without them, very symbolically, given what I’ve said earlier. Bayard Rustin, the out gay ex-communist conscientious objector — and that’s before you get to the fact that he’s Black — he’s the organizer of this march, and he runs out of Congress, sees the march leaving and says, “We are supposed to be leading them.”
They jump into their limousines and try to catch up with the march, but are blocked by the traffic — the traffic caused by the march that they themselves have called. They jump out of the limousines and they run to catch up with the march. And if you look at pictures of the leaders of the march, in a kind of Fred Flintstone version of Photoshopping, what they did was basically just clear people out of the way. So it looks as though they are at the front of the march, but actually they’re in the middle.
And throughout that day, King is worrying away at this text, scrolling all over it. If you look at what he ends up with, what’s left on the podium when he finishes speaking, it’s full of doodles and scrolls and so on.
George Lavender: You’re listening to Gary Younge, author of The Speech on Making Contact. Special thanks to The New School. Up next, Gary Younge explains what had to happen to turn Martin Luther King Jr from an unpopular figure at the time of his death to the widely praised icon we know today,
March on Washington Announcer [Audio Clip]: “…and I can tell from your applause, he needs no further introduction. Mr. Bob Dylan.”
Gary Younge: It was a hot day, 87 degrees at noon, and King is the 16th on an agenda of 80.
[Archival clip of Bob Dylan performing]
Gary Younge: He’s a 10th speaker. There’s been the anthem, the invocation, the prayer. There have been a range of a number of singers, including — Mahalia Jackson, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Bob Dylan. A range of people have sung.
[Brief archival clip of Bob Dylan performing and people cheering]
Gary Younge: And he takes to the podium about 2:30pm.
March on Washington Announcer [Audio Clip]: “At this time, I have the honor to present to you the moral leader of our nation. I have the pleasure to present to you Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” [crowd cheers]
Gary Younge: And according to Clarence Jones, who drafted much of the text, King keeps closer to this text than he would regularly keep.
Martin Luther King, Jr. [Audio Clip]: “I am happy to join with you today…”
Gary Younge: Those who wrote speeches for King said they were always king speeches basically. But you would be — in Clarence Jones’ words “like a very crude architect.” You would set up the four walls and then King, like a beautiful interior designer would come and he would make it his own. And King speaks very faithfully to the main text
Martin Luther King, Jr. [Audio Clip]: “Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
Gary Younge: And if you listen to the speech — and I would advise you to listen to it. It’s the most popular, least well-known speech I’ve heard of. When I told my brother I was doing this book, he said, “I love that speech. It’s such a great speech. You know that thing about, ‘I’ve been to the mountain top and I’ve seen the Promised Land.'” And I said, “It’s a great speech, but it’s not that speech.”
And he’s winding up. He says, “Go back to Mississippi. Go back to Louisiana. Go back to…
[fade into archival clip of speech]
Martin Luther King, Jr. [Audio Clip]: “South Carolina. Go back to Georgia. Go back to Louisiana. Go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.”
Gary Younge: Behind him is sitting Mahalia Jackson, a very, very close and special friend. When King was on the road, he would often call Mahalia Jackson for what they termed “gospel therapy.” He would call her and he would ask her to sing to him down the phone to soothe his spirit when he was down.
[clip of Mahalia Jackson singing]
Gary Younge: And so he knew her well. He knew her voice well, and she shout, “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin. Tell ’em about the dream.” She had heard him deliver the dream segment in June in Detroit. King continues:
Martin Luther King, Jr. [Audio Clip]: “Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.”
Gary Younge: and then she shouts again, “Tell us about the dream, Martin. Tell us about the dream.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. [Audio Clip]: “I say to you today, my friend…”
Gary Younge: And then in the words of Clarence Jones, “King puts his text to the left of the podium and in his body language changes from a lecturer to a preacher.” And Jones turns to the person next to him and says, “Those people don’t know him, but they’re about to go to church.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. [Audio Clip]: “So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow. I still have a dream.”
Gary Younge: At which point Wyatt T. Walker, the man who advised him not to do that, who’s in the crowd, turns to the person next to him and says, “Oh, shit. He’s doing the dream.” So, that’s how we got there. And what’s interesting is that when you ask people who were there at the time and who knew King well, to a person, they will tell you that — of all the speeches that he made, this was not particularly one that they thought we would be talking about in 50 years time. It was a great speech that none of them deny that, but many of them have different speeches that they thought were better. And either way they said great speeches was what King did.
And so I spend a fair amount of time in the book looking at why that is. I want to kind of really suggest two things here. The first is that, there is something for pretty much everybody in this speech. If you are an African American — part of a community who’s told that you are genetically stupid, that you are poor because you are stupid, that your stupidity is your responsibility, and that the failings in your community have nothing to do with history and everything to do with you — then to know that the best speech, America’s favorite speech, was delivered by an African American in the Black vernacular as an indictment of American racism is something to be very proud of. If you are a patriot, there is nothing in this speech that you need worry about.
Martin Luther King, Jr. [Audio Clip]: “It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.”
Gary Younge: Literally a metaphorically delivered in the shadow of Lincoln that pays homage to the founding fathers, the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. It’s an American speech, could not come from anywhere else. If you are progressive, this speech comes on this day. There have been few days like this for American progressives. Fair enough, only 20% of the crowd was white, which was less than what they were expecting. But nonetheless, this was the first march of its kind in Washington.
Now marches in Washington are two to a penny, but this mass demonstration, they hoped for 100,9000. They got 250,000. Had never been done before. And it comes — and this is the way I describe it in the book — it is the most eloquent articulation of the last great moral act that America can claim for which there is any consensus.
And that is the end of American Apartheid. That whatever people say now or feel able to say, nobody who wants to be taken serious is calling for those signs to go back up. Nobody is calling for a return to formal codified segregation. And however small that may seem, when we see the amount of racism that can still spew from the mouths of those who are elected or unelected, that is no small thing.
The end of apartheid is a big thing and I believe it’s the last great moral thing that America can really claim to have done as a country. So there that. A number of people have something to claim, but there’s also something else. King, when he delivers that speech, there is an even number of Americans with a favorable and unfavorable view of him.
By ’66, twice as many Americans have an unfavorable view than a favorable view. And then he’s dead in ’68, assassinated. By 1999, when Americans are polled on who are their favorite characters of the 20th century, King comes second only to Mother Teresa. So something happens between when he’s assassinated as a somewhat marginal and polarized figure and 1999, and this is what I think has happened.
First of all, why does he become unpopular? Well, when the speech is delivered, the year after comes a Civil Rights Act. The year after that comes a Voting Rights Act. Legislation begins to kick in and King understands that the end of segregation is not the same as the beginning of equality. As he says, “I have given people…we have won the right to eat in any restaurant of our choice, but we do not have the ability to eat everything that’s on the menu ’cause we can’t afford it.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. [Audio Clip]: “There are 40 million poor people here, and one day we must ask the question, why are there 40 million poor people in America? And when you begin to ask that question, you’re raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy.
And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve gotta begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s marketplace, but one day we must come to see that an edifice, which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised.
And you see my friends, when you deal with this, you began to ask the question, who owns the oil? You began to ask the question, who owns the iron? You began to ask the question, why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world is two thirds water?”
Gary Younge: Now that kind of talk in America 1967 will get you killed and sure enough, a year later he is killed. So he starts talking about capitalism. Year after that in ’67, he starts at the Riverside Church. He calls America,
Martin Luther King, Jr. [Audio Clip]: “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,”
Gary Younge: and takes us down against the Vietnam War. Now, how is America then gonna remember King? Well, it can’t remember him if it’s gonna raise him to iconic status, if it’s gonna put him on the mall. Then it has to sanitize him for public consumption. It has to make him the kind of person who could come second to Mother Teresa, and you can’t do that with a man in America who questions capitalism. Because to remember King in that way would not raise him above the fray would enter him into it. You can’t remember King as a man who criticized capitalism and still hold him up as an American icon. That doesn’t work unless what it takes to be an American icon changes.
You can’t remember him — America can’t remember him, the powers that be — as the man who called America the greatest purveyor of military violence in the world today because arguably it still is. And it was notable on the 50th anniversary of the speech, it took place literally on a split screen and on one screen there was Obama, Clinton, Carter, carrying King’s mantle cloaking themselves in his legacy.
And on the other screen, “Will we bomb Syria? When will we bomb Syria? Why wouldn’t we bomb Syria?” You can’t remember King as that, have him on the mall and still claim him to be an American icon when he’s speaking about America being the greatest purveyor of military violence. But you can remember him as a man who got rid of American Apartheid — not American racism, because that would involve a whole different set of conversations about why Black men in DC have a lower life expectancy rate than men on the Gaza Strip. You can’t have that conversation, but you can have the conversation about why or how he got rid of American apartheid. So that’s the way that they choose to remember him.
And so I end with just one paragraph where I talk about the process by which King — and through him, the speech — can be sanitized. And I say white America, most of it came to embrace King in the same way that most white South Africans came to accept Nelson Mandela: grudgingly and gratefully; retrospectively, selectively without grace, but with considerable guile.
By the time they realized their dislike of him was spent and futile, he’d created a world in which admiring him was in their own self-interest because in short, they had no choice. When it comes to King and his speech, one of the central arguments in this book is it’s not just about what you remember, it’s also about what you forget. Thank you.
[Applause]
George Lavender: And that’s it for this edition of Making Contact. You’ve been listening to Gary Younge, author of The Speech: Martin Luther King Jr’s Dream and the Story Behind It, published by Haymarket Books. Special thanks to the new school for use of their recording. To find out more about Making contact, go to focmedia.org. The Making Contact team includes. Kwan Booth, Laura Flynn, Jasmine Lopez, Lisa Rudman, and Andrew Stelzer. I’m George Lavender. Thanks for listening to Making Contact.
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