“We Cannot Walk Alone…
We Cannot Turn Back”
FlaglerLive | January 16, 2012
Martin Luther King at the March on Washington, 1963. (National Archives)
Martin Luther King’s birthday, as a national holiday, was first observed on Jan. 20, 1986, after a long battle in Congress to ratify the holiday.
The House of Representative approved the holiday bill on Aug. 2, 1983, by a vote of 338-90. Five of those No votes were cast by Florida congressmen, including Bill McCollum. Other Floridians voting against were Michael Bilirakis, Andy Ireland, Earl Hutto, and C. W. Bill Young. John McCain, then a member of the House, also voted against the bill. He later admitted to being wrong. Others voting against included Trent Lott, the Republican Senate Majority Leader during the George W. Bush administration, and Ron Paul, the Texas Republican.
The U.S. Senate finally approved the bill on Oct. 19, 1983, by a vote of 78-22, two weeks after North Carolina Republican Sen. Jesse Helms attempted to derail the effort with a one-man filibuster. He did not end the filibuster from a change of heart, but because he was worried that legislation favoring tobacco growers would be scuttled as a result of his rather bigoted assault on King’s memory. Helms’s pretext: King, in his view, was a communist sympathizer. “We’ll know in about 35 years, won’t we?” President Reagan, who had also initially resisted the holiday, said, in reference to court-sealed FBI records about King.
Other Senate opponents of the bill included Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), Chuck Grassley, (R-IA), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Frank Murkowski (R-AK) and Warren Rudman (R-NH).
King was born on Jan. 15, 1929, in Atlanta. His birthday is observed federally on the third Monday of January.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, his most famous, was delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963 as the culmination of the Washington Freedom Rally. Historian James MacGregor Burns described the scene in “Crosswinds of Freedom” (Knopf, 1989):
A quarter of a million people, black and white together, gathered in the summer heat at the Washington Monument and then surged forth to the Lincoln Memorial. They had come on buses and trains, many from the Deep South. Large contingents represented white religious faiths and, despite lack of backing by the AFL-CIO, many labor unions. Haunting freedom songs—”We Shall Overcome” sung by Joan Baez, “Oh, Freedom!” by Odetta—blended with speeches by the civil rights leadership. SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee]’s John Lewis pierced the uplifting mood by denouncing the inadequacy of conventional liberalism and Kennedy’s legislative program to complete “the unfinished revolution of 1776.”
Around midafternoon Martin Luther King stood beneath the brooding face of Abraham Lincoln. Inspired by the sea of upturned black and white faces, he left his carefully crafted text and in rippling cadences and rich
colors, he painted his vibrant dream of racial justice. Repeatedly invoking his phrase, “I have a dream,” responding to the people in rhythm with him, he implored that freedom ring from the hilltops of New Hampshire, the mountains of New York and Pennsylvania, and even more, from Georgia’s Stone Mountain. “Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and mole hill of Mississippi. From
every mountain top, let freedom ring. [...]A euphoric group of blacks, save for Coretta King, who to her distress was left to repair to her hotel room, met with the President following the rally. Having first opposed the march and then cooperated with it—to the point, some militants charged, of cooptation—Kennedy now shared in the moment of relief and triumph. He was “bubbling over with the success of the event,” [the NAACP's Roy] Wilkins recalled. But out on the Mall some blacks remained skeptical and even cynical. Listening to King, young activist Anne Moody had told herself that back in Mississippi they had never had time to sleep, much less dream. An angry black man had shouted: “Fuck that dream, Martin. Now, goddamit, NOW!”
It was a luminous moment in a season of death and despair. The very evening of Kennedy’s June television address, NAACP leader Medgar Evers had been shot down as he returned to his home in Mississippi; later
the President consoled the Evers family in the White House. By the end of the summer nearly 14,000 persons had been arrested in seventy-five cities in the South alone. Two weeks after the March, on a Sunday morning, a dynamite bomb exploded in Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, a center of the spring crusade, killing four black girls as they were donning their choir robes.
The full speech and video are below.
I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.
Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.
But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.
In a sense we have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.” But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. 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. 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. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.
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. Nineteen sixty-three 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. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.
But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. 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. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. They have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.
As we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back. 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 by signs stating “For Whites Only”. We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.
I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.
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. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.
I say to you today, my friends, 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 on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that 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.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.
I have a dream today.
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.
This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.
This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with a new meaning, “My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.”
And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!
Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!
Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!
But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!
Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
Any doubt that our most recent group of ignorant racists the teabaggers would be against a national holiday for King, on the grounds that you can’t create a national holiday with this economy, it would be a job killer.
Thank you!
Today is about more than pointing fingers and taking sides, it is about remembering the vision of a man that did not see skin color as a required inference to the discourse of a nation but rather the possibility of unity without boundaries akin to the color of a man’s skin. His speech is as relevant today as it was when he delivered it. We are divided today because we cannot talk to one another with an open ear. There is almost an outright refusal to hear another point of view. People escalate their tone until they are screaming over one another the point they are desperately trying to make. This is not to say we cannot disagree or cannot have passion about what concerns us but doing so with respect, dignity, and an open ear, is what creates progress rather than stagnant repetitive dialogue.
Well said! Unfortunately as time continues and the the nation moves on, it moves away from the needs of the people. Social causes have become an evil thing in the eyes of half of America. We have Red America that doesn’t seem to support social causes except dismantling the U.S. Constitution and Blue America. One of the major causes MLK was fighting for was helping the poor and disadvantaged. He spoke of blurring the lines of color as was stated and focused on the haves and have-nots. In December 2010 Americans mortgaged a little more money so that the two percent of the the wealthiest Americans can keep more of their moneys. This was in exchange for helping the unemployed get a mere nickel. Corporatism has total control of the media and our elected Officials and apparently also have control of the minds of many who now vote against their own interest. Slogans such as “Take our country back,” are on the lips of too many Americans which only proves one thing. We have already been taken back. Maybe it’s about seeing! We have a long way to go.
Interestingly enough, many more Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than Democrats.
Correction Jefferson: The Civil Rights Act passed by a 289-126 vote in the House, with 153 Democrats and 136 Republicans voting for, and 73-27 in the Senate, with 27 Republicans voting for. The proportion of Republicans voting for it was higher than the proportion of Democrats voting for it for two reasons: Democrats at the time controlled a sizable portion of each chamber, and Southern Democrats, who were indistinguishable from today’s more reactionary Republicans, voted almost all against the Act (as did, of course, what few Southern Republicans there were at the time until those Democrats got honest with themselves and took off the mask).
I strongly suggest you look up Dr. King’s party affiliation. The man was a Republican.
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.
Martin was NOT about socialism, he was about FREEDOM.
“Indistinguishable from today’s more reactionay Republicans?” That’s a crock. Love how you are attempting to rewrite history. Those people marching with Dr. King were REPUBLICANS.
The South was in the complete control of the Democrats (Dixiecrats) until about 1964.
This is an inspiring speech i could read it over and over. Thankyou Martin Luther King.
i reallly really like this, it is a verry goood speech , a must never forget speech i tell yu :D
What a powerful sentence “we will not be satisfied until the justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
The “i have a dream speech ” is awsome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!:)
the ‘i have a dream speech’ is awesome
i love martin luther king!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
nice i like the speech a lot i got to learn it
Yeaaah martin luther king jr
THIS SPEECH MADE HISTORY PERIOD AND WHO AFRICAN AMERICANS ARE TODAY LET FREEDOM RING
When I hear the speech . Off this man I was so happy . Off this world it is a powerfull . Speech I think god. Was and side this man. When He make this speech . When. I hear it Againt it make me felt full . This man talk about union. And. Freedrom for all Human rise . Black. White spinach. Yellow red. Pink blue and all Off God creating. Jusus Chris. Don’t. Have No color no one. No what is God color. Rest in peace your the MAN YOU ALWAYS AND ARE HEART .REST IN PEACE
i love you martin
7years old
thank u for your dedication you have paved the way for many of the african-american children my son is attending college this is his third year i wish we had more leaders like you thank you we will never forget about you and what you stood for .
Your son is attending college and VOTING, I hope. Good people in this country died to make sure he has that right.
A richly deserved holiday for a great man.
My favorite speech: “Why I am Opposed to the War in Vietnam.”
MLK, Jr. will never be forgotten.
I agree with Geezer Butler. I had not read it until it was pointed out to me today but Dr. King’s speech about the war in vietnam could be applied equally today to our war against Islam. If anyone wants to read it in full this is one link
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.html
This is only one excerpt
Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John:
Let us love one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. If we love one another God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.
Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says : “Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word.”
Anybody surprised?
That “Dr.” Martin Luther King, Jr.
-wasn’t born as Martin Luther anything
-plagiarized the works of many, throughout his college days, including for his doctoral dissertation
-cheated on his wife, repeatedly, often with white women, often with prostitutes
-physically abused many of the women he committed adultery with
-either a communist himself, and/or a troll of the communists
kthx, do the research yourself if you don’t believe me. Don’t believe in personality cults.
I wouldnt be in the world if i it wasnt for Martin Luther King Jr. My mom is white and my dad is black
by: Demetrius Jones
To: Martin Luther King Jr.
And i hope u are in a good place with God …….Love u brother