In 1963 Mother and I were busy. We lived on the New York side of the lake; Burlington and Camels Hump were part of our view to the east. Our kids were one and three years old. We were teaching school, and I was working on a blacktop crew for the summer to make ends meet. We’d bought three acres of land, and on a sheet of poster board, Mother was drawing the floor plan for our first house.
We got two channels of TV, Plattsburgh and Burlington, so we were aware of the growing civil rights movement in the United States. But that was far to the south of us. President Eisenhower, six years earlier, had mobilized the 101st Airborne to protect black students entering Little Rock, Arkansas, schools. The Freedom Riders, testing the Supreme Court decision that segregated bus seating was unconstitutional, had ventured into the South in 1961 and, with the collusion of local police, been beaten by Klansmen.
The Selma-to-Montgomery marches, with their grisly images of Alabama state troopers beating and gassing the participants, were still in the future; Bull Connor wasn’t even a name yet; and Jonathan Daniels, a young man from Keene, New Hampshire, who was martyred in August 1965 while defending an unarmed teenage girl after a protest in Alabama, was just entering seminary in Cambridge. If we ignored the jet tankers landing each evening at Plattsburgh Air Force Base and the missile silo a mile down the road, life was pretty peaceful in the north country.
The current issue of Time Magazine has reminded me how much we were missing. During the summer of 1963, the largest organizational effort of the civil rights movement, before or since, was taking shape: a march on Washington, at which Martin Luther King, Jr., would be the final speaker, at the Lincoln Memorial.
The Kennedys were not happy with the idea, but King insisted that, after 300 years of waiting, it was time for the oppressed to set the agenda. Washington police and J. Edgar Hoover were alarmed: If so many black people got together to protest, what riots might ensue? But they reckoned without the power of King’s message of nonviolence and its resonance with so many of his followers.
The organizers thought 35,000 people would be a good turnout, but planned for more. Porta-potties, volunteer marshals, sound technicians – the challenges were unprecedented. But somehow, when 250,000 showed up, it worked.
King’s climactic speech, written by a staffer the night before, was not going well, till Mahalia Jackson, standing nearby, shouted, “Tell ‘em about the dream, Martin!” The speechwriter, seeing him set the script aside, said, “These people don’t know it, but they’re about ready to go to church.”
We all know the words. They moved America as nothing else had for decades before. The moral tone of the revolution finally had been set; it remained for an assassination, three months later, to finally move the nation, like a ship freed from Arctic ice in spring, to muddle forward toward a new birth of freedom that has yet to be fully delivered. But thanks to a dream, it’s on its way!
This is Willem Lange in Montpelier, and I gotta get back to work.
