The date is literally carved in stone. It commemorates the historic event that took place exactly forty years ago today, on Aug. 28, 1963, when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech to roughly 250,000 of his fellow Americans gathered at the Mall, in which he called for an end to racial segregation in American society.
The speech, which the activist minister from Atlanta, Georgia, delivered while he stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, electrified the nation and inspired deprived folks elsewhere around the world. It wrought historic changes in civil rights laws, shattered smug traditions about the role of blacks in society, and transformed American cultural values.
The magnitude, significance and ultimate impact of that event, known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, should be seen also in its temporal context — a time in American history when the American people, at long last, were ready to recognize the compelling relevance of King’s call for justice after all those years that followed the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, with its broken promises, and Jim Crow rule in the South.
The quarter million people who participated in the march — a march now widely acknowledged as both a triumphal and memorable moment in modern American history — ended up listening, indisputably, to a masterpiece of oratory, attesting to how the power of words can enfold a visionary’s magnetic dream.
To be sure, the enduring effectiveness of King’s speech lay not so much in the eloquence of the words as in their musicality. That is why the text of “I Have a Dream” (you find it in “A Testament of Hope,” an anniversary edition of the preacher’s speeches) does not resonate as well when read as when listened to on tape. King, not unlike other African-Americans imbued with rhythm, strung words together much as a jazz soloist would string notes together. And like a jazz performer while jamming, King typically improvised a great deal in his address that day, combining melodic words from his prepared text with ideas he composed extemporaneously as he spoke. That’s not surprising, for the deepest energies of the American black soul have always been expressed more in music than in words.
King’s contribution to changing American history was to show that nonviolent resistance, at a time in our lives when the international community affects and is affected by events unfolding around it, can make a difference, and gain those pursuing it the moral high ground. In the case of the march on Washington, it triggered the emergence of powerful political forces in the establishment, and committed voices in civil society, that finally spurred the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
And America was never the same again.
One is tempted to ask if there is a lesson here for the Palestinian resistance, though it is not for a diaspora Palestinian like this columnist, who has lived most of his life in the West, to answer that question. Clearly, the idea of nonviolent resistance to oppression in Palestine may appear naive and absurd to Palestinians at this dreadful time in the occupied territories, and we should not make light of this posture. But suicide bombers, who have foisted themselves on a genuine movement for national liberation much sympathized with around the world, are not the answer. By adopting pacific tactics, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was not being a weakling. On the contrary, he recognized the moral superiority of his people’s appeal for justice, and thus the inevitability of its triumphal conclusion.
Indeed, no weakling was he. In that speech he spoke of a society where “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,” he also warned white America of a “whirlwind of revolt” that would “continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.”
America was responsive, the world was inspired, and the victim was delivered — all without a shot being fired or a suicide bomber detonating his explosives on a crowded bus.
- Arab News Opinion 28 August 2003
