'The
moment we'd all been waiting for': March attendees remember King's historic
'dream' speech
By
Tracy Jarrett, NBC News contributor
Fifty
years ago, more than 200,000 people gathered on the National Mall in
Washington, D.C., for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. NBC News
asked six African-Americans who attended the march to share their memories of
that day and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s "I Have a Dream" speech –
and how they’ve passed on King's message to the next generation.
Jack
White, 67, Journalist
Richmond,
Virginia
In
August of 1963, I was just out of high school and had a lot of curiosity about
the civil rights movement. I grew up in Washington, a segregated city, and
until 1954, I’d attended segregated schools.
On
the day of the March on Washington, I put on a sport coat and a tie; it was
sweltering hot. People were just more formal then.
The
powers that be were afraid of violence – can’t have all those Negroes there
without trouble! – but it was the opposite. People were peaceful, respectful.
Joyous and reverent would describe the mood.
When
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his famous speech it was all echoes to me.
Still, I knew it was a historic moment because I could feel it in the crowd –
this was the moment we’d all been waiting for.
Looking
back, the point that resonates with me most is when he talked about the
Declaration of Independence being a promissory note that all Americans should
be treated equal, but America had given a check to citizens of color saying
“insufficient funds.”
That’s
what bedevils us today, the contradiction between the magnificent visions that
Dr. King outlined and the reality that we have still yet to deliver on that
promissory note. How are we going to make America America for everybody who
lives in it? That was always the issue.
I
started having conversations with my kids about the notion of battling for
justice as soon as I thought they were old enough to understand that whatever
opportunities they enjoy come about as a consequence of what people did before
them.
On
one hand, my children and grandchildren have opportunities somebody my age
could never conceive. There’s nothing they can’t do. On the other hand, what
they don’t have, that people my age had, is this sense of a historic moment
when everything is changing.
Anne
Ruth Borders-Patterson, 73, Civil rights activist and retired professor
Atlanta,
Georgia
As a
little girl in Atlanta, I went to segregated schools. We got all our books and
desks second-hand from the white schools. I thought, why do we have to have
books like this, all torn and tattered? There were all these rules that were
supposed to make us think we were second-class citizens, though I never
believed that.
In
1960, when I was a junior at Spelman College, I was one of the organizers of the
Atlanta student movement. When we sat in at numerous “whites-only” restaurants,
I was one of those who went to jail. Three years later, I drove to the March on
Washington from Boston University, where I’d attended graduate school.
I
never imagined a crowd like that. It looked magical, unbelievable. I remember
not being able to move in the crowd. I remember children on their parents’
shoulders. And the number of white people out there -- to see all of them
amongst the crowd of black people was amazing.
When
King talked about looking forward to his little children being able to grow up
in a society where race was no longer defining who they were or who they would
become, that stood out to me a lot. I could begin to dream as he dreamed.
To
my kids I have said, don’t be lulled by the fact that you can sit where you
want on a bus or go to hotels, these are rights that you take for granted. You
stand on the shoulders of many people. I think we’ve made progress but I still
feel racism is alive and well in the United States today, and that is
unfortunate and disappointing. We must continue to be committed to fighting for
King’s dream.
Lurline
Jones, 68, Basketball coach and educator
Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania
My
mother had told me not to go to the march because she was scared of violence,
but I just had to go.
At
the time, I was part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at
Morgan State College in Baltimore and had been on freedom rides to Cambridge,
Maryland. I'd also participated in a sit-in with other students at a segregated
movie theater in Baltimore. Some of us ended up arrested. I spent five days in
jail. Afterwards, they integrated the theater.
The
day of the march, the streets of Washington were filled with people coming from
every direction, and everybody was going to the same place. We were arm in arm,
singing, “We shall overcome.”
The
line from Dr. King’s speech that really resounded with us, what we could hear
loud and clear, was “free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we are
free at last.” The whole place erupted in cheers, people were jumping up and
down, hugging and kissing.
I
knew that I was doing something to let the people in this country know that you
can’t continue to treat us the way you’ve been treating us, because we are
Americans. We believe in the preamble and the Constitution. We fight in wars.
We should be treated right. I felt very strongly that that’s what would happen.
I really <HTML><META
HTTP-EQUIV="content-type"
CONTENT="text/html;charset=utf-8">believed the dream_
I
was with my grandchildren the other day, and I was telling them about the
march. I wanted them to know about it, and about Dr. King. I told my son,
“Please make sure that my grandchildren will always remember that their
grandmother was there, and that their grandmother has always been a fighter and
continues to be a fighter for equality.”
All
the things that we marched for in 1963 are basically the same problems we face
in 2013. In some instances, doors have opened, some doors have been shut, and
some doors have been left ajar, but it’s still a process. I don’t think we are
all the way there.
