A dream is not enough. Without a realistic assessment of the world and good organization, a dream is just air and pleasant thoughts.
The quarter of a million people who swarmed into Washington DC for the "Freedom March" forty years ago this week, weren't there to hear a dream. They were there because they had a problem. And it was the problem that Dr. Martin Luther King addressed first. "We have come here today," he said, "to dramatize an appalling condition."
The Emancipation Proclamation was over 100 years old. Still, in 1963, Blacks could not vote in many parts of the South.
The Supreme Court of the United States had ruled that segregated, "separate but equal," schools violated the constitution, but those schools existed all over the South, in defiance of the Court. In South Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi, not a single Black child had attended an integrated public school during the 1962-1963 school year.
Tempers were short and violence was everywhere. Civil Rights demonstrators had been jailed, beaten, and set upon by dogs. In June, civil rights leader Medgar Evers had been shot and killed outside his home in Mississippi. Earlier in the year, the National Guard had been called in to quell racial violence in Cambridge, Maryland, not far from Washington, DC.
The situation was enough to draw the people, but it was not enough to get all of them to the same place in Washington DC at the same time and in good order. Organization did that.
The great organizer behind the march itself was a fascinating character named Bayard Rustin. Rustin was a Quaker and a pacifist. He learned organizing while working for labor leader A. Philip Randolph and helped connect Dr. King to Randolph's organization. Rustin had met Martin Luther King during the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 - 1956.
That's when Rustin and King had started reaching out to the churches and ministerial associations in the South. When it came time to plan the Freedom March, they called on Randolph and they called on the churches and they built commitment and excitement that was contagious.
The momentum grew during the weeks before the march. Buses were rented. In some towns in the South every available bus was rented for the trip and filled to capacity. The trains were filled, too. Folks who decided to go to Washington late were likely to find that there was no way they could get there. Undaunted, some hitchhiked hundreds of miles.
The momentum that filled the buses and trains also scared the folks in power in Washington. Every police officer in all the agencies in the District of Columbia was on alert. The Army put thousands of troops on standby, in case they were needed. They were not.
In the end there were only four arrests. The marchers had come and gone with great power and excitement, but they had come and gone in good order. That was the way Dr. King challenged them to conduct the struggle for their rights and equality. "We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline," he said "we must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force."
Not everyone agreed with Dr. King on the violence issue. All around the country loud and strong voices cried out to overcome injustice with violence, to fight for rights with violence, to meet violence with violence. The violence would not end simply because of a speech.
Less than three weeks after Dr. King's speech in Washington, three young Black girls were killed when their church in Birmingham, Alabama was bombed. The people needed a dream because the way would be hard.
And so Dr. King began to lay out his dream. On that hot August day, forty years ago, one of the great crusaders for justice and one of the great orators of all time rose to the challenge of the day and the place. Dr. Martin Luther King had given the people the realism of the situation, he had told them what they must do. And then he gave them his dream.
"I have a dream," he began each section that painted a picture of what the future could be. He used the phrase eight times. With the dream, the faith, he said, "we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope."
If we could do that, Dr. King told us we could make freedom ring from every one of the mountains in the country. Those words still speak to us across the decades. They resonate with the challenge to let freedom ring in our day and future, and a vision of what the future can be.
Situations change and today is not the same as 1963. But we must still dream. And we must plan and we must organize. The dream can be ours. We, too, can let freedom ring in a future we can work toward, but now only imagine.
Listen, again, to Dr. King's words:
"When we let freedom 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!'"
