“Let Us Not Wallow in the Valley of Despair”

Rustin had limited the speakers that day to just five minutes each and threatened to come on with a crook and haul them from the podium when their time was up. But they all overran, and given the heat — 87 degrees at noon — and the humidity, the mood began to wane.

King was the last speaker. By the time he reached the podium, many in the crowd had started to leave. “I tell students today, ‘There were no Jumbotrons back then,’” Rachelle Horowitz, who as a young activist had organized transport to the march, told me. “All people could see was a speck and they listened to it.”

Not all those who remained could hear him properly, but those who could stood rapt. “Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed,” said King as though he were wrapping up. “Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.”

Then he grabbed the podium and set his prepared text to his left. “When he was reading from his text, he stood like a lecturer,” Jones told me. “But from the moment he set that text aside, he took on the stance of a Baptist preacher.” Jones turned to the person standing next to him and said: “Those people don’t know it but they’re about to go to church.”

A smattering of applause filled a pause more pregnant than most.

“So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.”

“Aw shit,” said Wyatt Walker, who was on the Mall. “He’s using the dream.”

Why Do We Remember It?

Martin Luther King delivered many speeches (at least 350 in 1963 alone). Many speeches have been delivered on civil rights and, indeed, were delivered at the March on Washington. So what was it that made this particular speech historical? And what makes it great? Why do we remember it? How do we remember it? What is it about it that we like to remember? And what about it have we chosen to forget?

When King was assassinated in Memphis in 1968, he was not particularly popular, and the speech had not gained the legendary status it has today. Both he and the address could have gone the way of many great leaders and addresses and, in the words of Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, been “amputated” from the body of history.

Paradoxically, while the “dream” segment is the most memorable element, it was never included in King’s prepared text. Would the speech have been remembered in the same way, or even at all, if King had not taken that spontaneous turn?

It was not the only compelling refrain in the address. Near the beginning he talks about the United States’ reneging on its promises to African Americans: “In a sense we have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check . . . a promissory note . . . for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” written by the drafters of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

He goes on to argue that the country has paid with a bad check and effectively defaulted on its promise. “We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation,” he says. “So we have come to cash this check — a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.”

Then, right at the end, he shifts to a riff borrowed from the nineteenth-century patriotic song “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” in particular the last line of its first verse: “Let freedom ring.” Starting with the more liberal North, he takes the crowd on an evocative tour of the United States, calling for freedom to ring from “the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire . . . to the curvaceous slopes of California.” Finally, he takes a dark turn toward the South, including “every hill and molehill in Mississippi,” a state he has earlier described as “sweltering with the heat of injustice.”

While neither passage is quite as long as the “I have a dream” section, both are substantial and evocative. “Even the way it’s always referred to tells you everything you need to know about what people want to remember,” Jack O’Dell, one of King’s former aides, told me. “Nobody ever calls it the ‘bad check’ speech.”

The Other King

Most who knew King and his work believe he gave at least one speech that deserved as much or perhaps more historical attention than that delivered to the March on Washington. “I think his speech four years later at the Riverside Church in New York, in which he condemned the war in Vietnam and talked about the United States as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, was by far the best speech of his life in terms of sheer tone and substance,” argues Lewis.

But to bemoan the absence of King’s other great speeches, or other sections of the Washington speech, from public consciousness would be to mistake collective memory as something other than selective and contingent. To honor King as an antiwar crusader, America would have had to come to terms with its militaristic impulses. Similarly, to recall King’s Washington speech through the metaphor of “the bad check” would demand an engagement with both the material legacy of racism and the material remedy of antiracism — a challenge the country has hardly begun to address.

Venerating his speech at the March on Washington through the dream sequence, however, upholds a positive (albeit metaphorical) diagnosis for an apparently chronic ailment — American racism. As such, it is a rare thing in almost any culture or nation — an optimistic oration about race that acknowledges the desperate circumstances that made it necessary while still projecting hope, patriotism, humanism, and militancy.

These strengths in the breadth of its appeal are also its flaws in terms of depth. It is in no small part appreciated so widely because the interpretations of what King was saying vary so widely. In 2010, on the forty-seventh anniversary of the speech, media personality and Tea Party favorite Glenn Beck held the “Restoring Honor” rally at the Lincoln Memorial, telling a crowd of around ninety thousand that “the man who stood down on those stairs . . . gave his life for everyone’s right to have a dream.” Almost a year later black Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain opened his speech to the Southern Republican Leadership Conference with the words “I have a dream.”

Their embrace of the speech, particularly when using elements out of context to challenge affirmative action and civil rights legislation, has made some black intellectuals and activists wary. “The speech is profoundly and willfully misunderstood,” King’s longtime friend Vincent Harding told me. “People take the parts that require the least inquiry, the least change, the least work.”

“Not an End, but a Beginning”

In the speech King claims: “1963 is not an end, but a beginning.” In terms of mass, popular, nonracial activism against Jim Crow, it would turn out to be the beginning of the end — a pivotal, seminal milestone in the push for social justice.

Decades later, it is clear that in eliminating legal segregation — not racism but formal, codified discrimination — the civil rights movement delivered the last moral victory in America for which there is still a consensus.

While the struggle to defeat segregation was bitter and divisive, nobody today is seriously campaigning for its return or openly mourning its demise. The speech’s appeal lies in the fact that, whatever the interpretation, it remains the most eloquent, poetic, unapologetic, and public articulation of that victory.