For a singer who won three Grammy awards and was known as the ‘Queen of Gospel’, it is surprising that my android phone and HP laptop keyboards do not recognise her first name. Mahalia, whose second name was Jackson, also found a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and played a significant role in the American Civil Rights Movement.
What is, perhaps, not as well known about Jackson is that she prompted Martin Luther King Jr. to talk about his dream for African-Americans during his speech at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963. But for her, the greatest speech in modern history, “I have a dream”, might never have been delivered.
Jackson was a friend of King’s and his favourite singer in the church. The March on Washington was a defining moment in the rights movement as was King’s speech: “We felt that Martin had an obligation to provide leadership, offering a vision that we were involved in action not activity; a clear-eyed assessment of the challenges we faced and a road map of how we could best meet those challenges,” Clarence Jones wrote in his book “Behind the Dream: The Speech that Transformed a Nation.”
In the discussions preceding the March, King’s advisor Wyatt Walker told him not to use the “trite” and “hackneyed” dream theme King had used in previous speeches. King heeded his advice, and there was no reference to it in the script that King prepared in Willard Hotel overnight on August 7.
King was among the 16 civil rights movement speakers set to speak that Wednesday, marking the 100 years of the Emancipation Proclamation, which remained meaningless in the absence of voting rights for blacks. Much deliberation went into deciding King’s slot in the sequence, and given his star power, King was listed last in order to retain the crowd till the end. Both Jackson and Walker were on the stage when King spoke.
The response of the crowd to the speech was lukewarm until Jackson shouted out loud, “Tell them about the dream, Martin. Tell them about the dream.”
When she prompted King, he looked in her direction. It is as though a current passed into King. He set aside the script and burst forth in spontaneity, electrifying an audience 250,000 people for the last five minutes of his speech.
The effect is the same today as one hears the speech, available on YouTube, stoking curiosity about why it is so. The test of time is hard and often fails the greatest speeches and speakers, but if King transcended time with his words, there must be something phenomenal in them. In 1999, a panel of 130 scholars ranked it as the number one speech of the 20th century, beating, among others, John F. Kennedy’s historic speech, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”(Available on YouTube.)
King’s speech has been analysed from the perspective of eloquence, brilliance, integrity, beauty, poetry and politics. But its unparalleled appeal, 61 years after it was delivered, can only be explained by one thing: Its “soul force.”
King’s words were fuelled by deep empathy, anguish, and a determination to keep the civil rights movement peaceful in the face of the worst police brutalities against negroes, but most of all, they were in tune with his style as an ace preacher. It was only natural that a man of King’s prolific faith and scriptural learning should send out a powerful political message in lilting prose that would variously move, inspire, cajole and awaken the listeners, and even jolt the establishment.
There was muted militancy in the speech: “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.
“It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. 1963 is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual.”
King knew that there was no weapon more powerful than peace, and so he warned the listeners against violence: “In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.
“We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.”
His message to the status quoists was equally powerful: “There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, when will you be satisfied? We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities.
“We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity.”
And then there was a reminder to America like none other before. “So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal……
“I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”
In a memo about the speech, assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) William C. Sullivan wrote this: “Personally, I believe in the light of King’s powerful demagogic speech yesterday that he stands head and shoulders above all other Negro leaders put together when it comes to influencing great masses of Negroes. We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security.”
(Dangerous or not, King was certainly effective. Following the March, three important legislations came into being: The 1964 Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, 1965 and Fair Housing Act, 1968.)
President John F. Kennedy, who had naturally been on edge about the huge gathering in the nation’s capital, and watched King on television, commented, “He is damned good. Damned good.” There are other eminent leaders and journalists who found the speech “enthralling”, “mesmerising” and “the most memorable moment of life.”
Even today, those compliments hold true, and the speech resonates with the American people. In a 2008 survey about the relevance of the speech to America of the present generation, 68 percent of Americans said yes, including 76 percent of blacks and 67 percent of whites, although four percent people were not familiar with it.
Did King give us a hint about the immortal appeal of his speech? As he parted with his friends and advisors discussing the speech in the hotel lobby on the eve of the March, King told them, “I am now going upstairs to my room to counsel with my Lord.” He sure seems to have done that. It is in the fitness of things that it was Jackson, the gospel singer, who prompted King to talk about the dream. As he discarded the script, King’s extempore words became a flow for the divine. There is no other way to explain why the speech is still spell-binding.
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