Today, Aug. 28, marks 62 years since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial.
Listen to it, and watch it if you can. Watch as King shifts from the formality of a speaker reading from a prepared text to one of an impassioned preacher. Watch as the hand of a National Park Service ranger, Gordon “Gunny” Gundrum, lowers the microphones arrayed before King, a visible recognition of this white man’s understanding of the import behind what this Black man was saying. Watch as King looks out on the crowd below, looks out to the distant horizon, as if envisioning the dream he shared with his audience.
Listen to it if, for no other reason, than to be swept away by the current of oratory otherwise so lacking in American public life today. And listen all the way to the end. Because it’s there, toward the end, that King makes a remark that we would do well to reflect on in this era of Make America Great Again or Keep America Great or whatever it is these days.
After describing his dream — a dream in which his children will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character — King invokes the song, “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee.” He quotes its first verse, ending with the line: “From ev’ry mountainside, let freedom ring.”
In the same breath, King adds: “And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.”
This appeal to national greatness from our nation’s greatest civil rights leader is rooted in the belief that freedom is the prerogative of “all of God’s children.”
Dr. King recognized that, in 1963 America, our aspirations to greatness remained a forward-looking exercise. His was not a yearning for some vague and distant past but a striving toward a better, more equitable future. He spoke these words, of course, in the “symbolic shadow” of Abraham Lincoln, who labored for “a new birth of freedom” in his own time.
Importantly, King said, “And if America is to be a great nation…” rather than “a great country.” While small, this difference reflects the dimensions of his dream. He recognized that greatness as a physical entity demarcated by boundaries — that is, our country — meant nothing if pursued at the cost of our soul, that is, our nation.
In this way, our nation reflects the content of our character in the way that the country reflects the color of our skin. His call for greatness is rooted in our behavior as individuals and in relation to one another, behavior that in our day-to-day actions advances the cause of freedom. This must be true not only for ourselves or people who look like us, but for all Americans.
At a time when the homeless in our nation’s capital have been demeaned by the president, when a Cabinet secretary speaks of being proud of our past absent an active engagement with the lessons that that past has to offer, when the Department of Homeland Security uses nativist language and images to promote a certain idea of America, it can feel as though we as a nation are far from actualizing the freedom about which King spoke.
Being far from it, however, doesn’t mean we need abandon it. Because we, as a nation, are a resilient people. We’ve been far from it before and, if imperfect and delayed, have sought to close the gap between lip-service to our creed and, to paraphrase Dr. King, living out its true meaning.
We were far from it at Antietam, but won the Civil War and outlawed slavery in our country — forever. We were far from it when women weren’t allowed to vote, and then moved closer to it when that right became enshrined in a constitutional amendment in 1920. We were far from it when we held tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans in internment camps during World War II, and drew closer to it when the Civil Liberties Act was signed into law in 1988, a formal acknowledgement of a historical wrong.
And we were far from it on a late August afternoon in Washington, D.C., 62 years ago when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stepped up to the podium on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The following year, the Civil Rights Act was signed into law. The year after that, the Voting Rights Act became law. These laws moved us closer to that freedom.
We may feel far from it today — and, in many respects, that sentiment is justified. But if you need a jolt of the American promise, of what striving in its pursuit looks and sounds like, you could do worse than watching King’s “I Have a Dream” speech today.
David Peduto writes from Annapolis.
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