“Let Freedom Ring!”

PETER: We’re back with BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: And I’m Brian Balogh. We’re devoting today’s show to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which took place 50 years ago this week.

PETER: Among the crowd in DC that day was a 22-year-old from Florida named Hank Thomas. He was a veteran of the 1961 Freedom Rides across the South and had volunteered to be a security marshal in the march. And he said the excitement in the air was palpable as the lineup of speakers neared its end.

HANK THOMAS: Everyone there, while we had great speeches– my fellow Freedom Rider, John Lewis, Congressman Lewis now, made an outstanding speech. But it was just building up the crescendo to the main event. And everybody knew what that main event was, and that was Dr. King. And he did not disappoint anyone. Even though I was there, but when I hear recordings of that speech today, I still get chill bumps.

A. PHILIP RANDOLPH: I have the pleasure to present to you Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

[APPLAUSE]

ED: You’d be hard-pressed today to find someone who doesn’t recognize the phrase, “I have a dream.” But it’s worth noting that those four words, I have a dream, didn’t come until the very end of King’s speech that day. David Blight is a historian at Yale University, and he says the first 14 minutes of this speech were all about the past, not the future. And he says it’s important to remember that the very same time that King gave his speech, the nation was marking the centennial of the Civil War.

MARTIN LUTHER KING: Five score years ago, a great American in whose symbolic shadow we stand today signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

DAVID BLIGHT: Of course, he starts with five score because he’s drawing off the famous four score of the Gettysburg Address. He’s reminding the country that this was 1963, the 100th anniversary year of the Emancipation Proclamation, and that, as he says four times as a refrain in the first paragraph of the Dream speech, and the Negro is not free. And the Negro is not free.

MARTIN LUTHER KING: The Negro still is not free. 100 years later–

DAVID BLIGHT: He’s there asking the United States to live up to its creeds. And, of course, those creeds are stated in the Declaration of Independence, which he draws on. And then it’s restated, reinvented in a way, in the Emancipation Proclamation and the constitutional amendments that came out of the Civil War.

MARTIN LUTHER KING: When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note.

DAVID BLIGHT: In the second paragraph, he draws on what he called the promissory note, which had come back, he says, labeled insufficient funds in the bank of American justice. That’s an unforgettable, powerful metaphor.

MARTIN LUTHER KING: It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned.

ED: Did people think about the civil rights struggle and think about the centennial of the Civil War at the same time? I mean, we look back on it, and of course those two things happening exactly 100 years apart, the irony strikes us now. What did people at the time think about that?

DAVID BLIGHT: The truth is, the huge public commemoration that we know as the Civil War centennial, which had a national commission with large budgets– there were state commissions in virtually every state, especially Southern states. There were lots of reenactments. There were all kinds of commemorations of the Blue and the Grey, and the glory enough to be spread around in the kind of national reconciliation of the Civil War.

But that Civil War centennial in all of its popular cultural manifestations and the civil rights movement, this growing, huge civil disobedience movement in the streets of the United States in which people were risking their lives and dying, the two never actually occupied the same space very often. It’s what makes that moment at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the March on Washington and that particular speech, so poignant because King brought the two together.

And he’s saying to the country, to the world, look, we’re having this huge– “celebration” was the word often used– of a civil war, a vast civil war in which hundreds of thousands of people had died, the country all but destroyed and then preserved and reinvented. Slavery ended, followed by a regime of segregation that still existed. The two stories were so intimately tied, but not in the popular imagination.

MARTIN LUTHER KING: We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.

DAVID BLIGHT: King is not just challenging Southern segregationists in this moment. I mean, he is, but that’s not all he’s challenging. He’s challenging the whole nation. He’s challenging the whole idea of a grand national narrative of who we are. He’s saying, we’re having this anniversary of the Civil War, but we’re forgetting what it was about. And that’s why we’re here today. That’s why we’re here. We’re marching on the government because the promises that that civil war brought about are utterly unfulfilled.

MARTIN LUTHER KING: So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.

ED: Why in our own memory have we edited out the great majority of the “I Have a Dream” speech for just that last part? Why have we edited out the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation in our memory?

DAVID BLIGHT: Well, terrific question. I suppose it’s because it’s much easier to teach young children the last three minutes of that speech. That’s about a dream of racial cooperation. It’s about a dream of integration. It’s about a dream of brotherhood and sisterhood.

I remember there’s a wonderful passage by James Baldwin, who was, of course, at the march. And then afterward he wrote, among other things about it– he said, it was a day when we could see our heritage. We could see our inheritance. It was like you could see your history. You could feel your history.

But I don’t think you were feeling the history just from the last three minutes about the dream. You were feeling it as King took you through that litany of its denial.

ED: And that’s part of your answer, isn’t it. People don’t want to hear about denial and betrayal, right?

DAVID BLIGHT: No, we don’t. We like the end, and not the story of how we got there. Every year on King’s birthday and then throughout the year, we sometimes endlessly hear about keeping the dream alive, keeping the dream alive. Well, of course we all want to keep the dream alive. But sometimes I think that very language gets in the way of what we’re actually talking about.

MARTIN LUTHER KING: I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state–

ED: David Blight is a professor of history at Yale.

[MUSIC – EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKY, “HUMAN QUALITIES”]

BRIAN: Ed, we all admire that lofty language at the end of King’s speech. But David Blight correctly, I think, is a little critical that this is all we remember. But it seems to me that it’s those very lofty words that create the promissory note that King refers to in the body of this speech, the promise to deliver on the Declaration of Independence, the promise to deliver on the Emancipation Proclamation. And it’s that lofty finish that really is the call to action. Pay up, is what King is saying.

ED: Yeah, Brian, I think that what King is doing here is evoking a lot of the great American speeches that have worked on the same theme of debt and obligation and possibility. And I think about the Gettysburg Address where Abraham Lincoln not only thinks about four score and seven years ago but he’s saying, we need to fight this war so our ideals will not perish from the face of the earth in the future.

Then you think about, close in time to the “I Have a Dream” speech, of John F. Kennedy asking people to think about what they owe the nation as well as what the nation owes them. So I think that King is speaking not only from the perspective of the civil rights struggle, not only from the perspective of African-American history, but from the perspective of American history, calling us to our highest ideals.

PETER: And Ed, I agree. There’s a lot of resonance in King’s speech and those others that you cite that look to the future and that focus on the unfulfilled promises of the American Revolution, of American independence. But I think it’s in tension with another way of thinking about history.

And that is to cherish the past, what you might call heritage, an idea that, well, hey, we achieved greatness with a kind of virgin birth. The new United States announces new principles of government that have inspired the world ever since. And I think that idea is in tension with the notion that, well, maybe we haven’t fulfilled those promises.

And this is what the Civil Rights Movement is saying. In effect, it’s challenging Americans to rethink their past at the very moment when we’re celebrating. White Americans particularly are looking back and celebrating the reconciliation of that great rift in the 19th century between North and South. Having healed those wounds, that restored American greatness. Well, maybe it didn’t. Maybe there’s more work to be done.

BRIAN: And that’s the point. Both are looking at the long history, with the progressives saying, it’s been too long, and with those advocating heritage saying, look at all we’ve done over our history.

[MUSIC PLAYING]