The speech is almost biblical in its proportions. And its impact. The foe, racial prejudice and the hatred and injustice that trail in its infamous wake, is Leviathan. Like roiling waters, it is a force of unnatural chaos, drowning and sweeping away without regard to age or innocence. With demonic determination, it resolves to obliterate an entire collection of people, even as it irrationally seeks somehow simultaneously to subjugate them, conscript them and consign them to do its bidding.
The speech, a masterpiece of American rhetoric, builds intentionally from the Bible, the source book for Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and the movement he led. It was a speech crafted and delivered to engage the monster. And though the speech did not put the beast down, it unleashed the vision of a world free of the creature’s control, and it enlisted our social, political, economic, and spiritual efforts to make the vision real. The speech believed that, with God’s help, those who attended to its words, caught inspiration from its ideas and deployed its dream would terminate racial injustice and establish civil rights. For people like me.
On August 28, 1963, I was 7 years old. In a matter of days, I would enter Mrs. Branch’s segregated second grade classroom at the Hardy Elementary school where, by law, all of the black children in Smithfield, Va., began their “separate but equal” public education. When my parents, brothers and I drove to Philadelphia to visit my grandmother, my mom packed wonderful picnic lunches for the ride. Only years later did my parents confess that the lunches were not a picnic; they were insurance against the possibility – the inevitability – that a place we stopped to eat might refuse to serve us.
Though I was never myself forced to walk past a sign that said “colored,” I felt the weight of deep sadness as my parents shared their damaging recollections. I have walked the streets on my way to a movie, running an errand or just enjoying the day in my little country town and in some of the nicest cities and towns in America and been assaulted from nowhere, for no reason with a soul-jarring, spiritually deflating racial epithet.
At the Lincoln Memorial that hot summer day, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke for me and every one of my classmates at Hardy, at the state-mandated all-black elementary and high schools all across the United States of America; for my parents and my brothers; for every one of us who felt the animus of people who have hated us for being us.
The speech did not arise from the ether of cloistered spiritual reflection. It was the embodiment of confrontational moments of civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance against the Jim Crow culture that thought to inoculate white people from black people as though blackness was a disease that corrupted and crippled. The laws that enforced the separation permitted white Americans the privilege of belief that their kind was superior. Those laws taunted black Americans with the threat that no measure of politics, protest or prayer would ever transfigure the circumstance that haunted them. In multiple venues prior to Aug. 28, 1963, King had battled such segregationist laws and the vicious sentiment upholding them with the metaphorical weapon that was his dream.
The biblical prophets, laboring in wastelands of societal injustice, had dreamed dreams of a future where God was reconciled with God’s people and, in turn, all God’s people had realized reconciliation with each other. Like them, King, well before that march on Washington, had been marshalling a dream of reconciliation for a United States where the law treated black people and white people with equal respect. King was enough of a realist to know that changing the laws would not change the hearts of every racially prejudiced person. So he did not yet dream of changed people. But he did dream of a changed America, an America where all its citizens were treated equally because equality was enforced by law.
At least as early as 1960, when he addressed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) with a speech entitled “The Negro and the American Dream,” he began, providentially, laying the groundwork for the speech that would, arguably, become the vocal cornerstone of the American Civil Rights Movement. One cannot read the opening paragraph of that powerful address without recognizing the gestating ideas and the convicting words that would power the Washington speech three years later.
“This afternoon I would like to speak from the subject, ‘The Negro and the American Dream.’ In a real sense America is essentially a dream – a dream yet unfulfilled. It is the dream of a land where men of all races, colors and creeds will live together as brothers. The substance of the dream is expressed in these sublime words: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ This is the dream. It is a profound, eloquent and unequivocal expression of the dignity and worth of all human personality.”
Confronting the specter of racial inequality in Detroit in June of 1963, King had again delivered an engaging “dream” speech: “The Great March To Freedom.” Before 25,000 people in Detroit’s Cobo Hall, immediately following the Great Walk to Freedom March in the city, King punctuated the close of his speech with the powerful refrain “I have a dream …” that lives on in history from the Washington March. Before he closed that Detroit speech to thunderous applause by calling upon the words from the Old Negro Spiritual, “Free at last, free at last, Thank God Almighty we are free at last,” he premiered words that forever echo out from the Lincoln Memorial.
These words were particularly important for a child like me, headed into a segregated second grade, and all but doomed to a future of such segregation but for the actions that words like these inspired: “I have a dream this afternoon that my four little children will not come up in the same young days that I came up within, but they will be judged on the basis of the content of their character, not the color of their skin.” He said it better two months later in Washington. He was able to say it better there because he had been practicing the words and the vision everywhere. The dream speech was not just about a moment in time on the Washington Mall. The dream speech belonged as much to his tumultuous past as to his wondrous present and horrific future.
The dream speech belongs equally well to our own uncertain racial present. W.E.B. DuBois’ 1903 assessment in his book “The Souls of Black Folk,” that the problem of the 20th century was the problem of the color line, is as eerie a prophecy about our present as it was a dead-on reflection of his. For this reason, until King’s dream is fully realized, its words and its vision ought to be repeated in every village and hamlet across these United States. King himself can no longer proclaim them. We can. We must.
Like King, we must continue to press our country to live into its creed that all humans are created equal before God and before one another. King believed what I believe, that our flawed founders, mired deep in the morass of slavery, were inspired by God to be better in their vision than they were in their lives. By continuing to press the dream, we continue to press the country and its people to live into that vision.
Like King, we must not surrender the fight for civil rights and complete equality under the law for every person and all people in this country. Like King, we must remain vigilant as the Congress, the president and the courts propose, enact and review laws that either further or restrict that equality. Like King, we must continue believing in something, in some One better than ourselves. If we are all we have, if what we have accomplished thus far in terms of racial reconciliation and civil rights is the best we can do, we are lost. King’s dream inspires us to believe not in the society our limited eyes and intellects have established, but in the vision of reconciliation and justice that the power of God and the resolve of people inspired, engaged and activated by that power can inaugurate.
What does that dream mean, 50 years later? It means we must keep dreaming that dream.
BRIAN K. BLOUNT is president and professor of New Testament at Union Presbyterian Seminary.
