Remembering Martin Luther King, Jr.
The following was written by James Reston, for the New York Times, on August 29, 1963, the day the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream…” speech.
Abraham Lincoln, who presided in his stone temple today above the children of the slaves he emancipated, may have used just the right words to sum up the general reaction to the Negro’s massive march on Washington. “I think,” he wrote to Gov. Andrew G. Curtin of Pennsylvania in 1861, “the necessity of being ready increases. Look to it.” Washington may not have changed a vote today, but it is a little more conscious tonight of the necessity of being ready for freedom. It may not “look to it” at once, since it is looking to so many things, but it will be a long time before It forgets the melodious and melancholy voice of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. crying out his dreams to the multitude.
It was Dr. King who, near the end of the day, touched the vast audience. Until then the pilgrimage was merely a great spectacle. Only those marchers from the embattled towns in the Old Confederacy had anything like the old crusading zeal. For many the day seemed an adventure, a long outing in the late summer sun – part liberation from home, part Sunday school picnic, part political convention, and part fish fry.
But Dr. King brought them alive in the late afternoon with a peroration that was an anguished echo from all the old American reformers. Roger Williams calling for religious liberty, Sam Adams calling for political liberty, old man Thoreau denouncing coercion, William Lloyd Garrison demanding emancipation and Eugene V. Debs crying for economic equality – Dr. King echoed them all.
“I have a dream,” he cried again and again. And each time the dream was a promise out of our ancient articles of faith” phrases from the Constitution, lines from the great anthem of the nation, guarantees from the Bill of Rights, all ending with a vision that they might one day all come true.
