Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  At the Washington Monument staging area, a public address system came alive shortly after ten o’clock with the voice of Joan Baez, who entertained the early-bird crowd by singing “Oh Freedom,” a spiritual that Odetta had made popular. Odetta herself came on next, singing “I’m On My Way,” and her mountainous voice prompted Josh White to jump up beside her out of turn. White, whose career reached back into the 1920s and 1930s, when young Communist Bayard Rustin had been one of his sidemen, asked Baez to join them during a number, and soon Peter, Paul and Mary stepped in among them. The trio took the lead on one of their new hits, Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and then Dylan himself stepped out among them. He had just written a ballad about the death of Medgar Evers. It was a rare moment for folk music, as the performers on the stage had gained celebrity status for themselves and celebrity for their overtly cross-racial tradition. To underscore their respect for the movement, they brought on the SNCC Freedom Singers from Albany. Baez had just persuaded one of them, Bernice Johnson, to give up the study of opera for what became a luminous career as a performer and student of music derived from Africa; Rutha Harris, much to her eventual regret, was about to turn down a recording contract because she had promised her mother she would finish school in Albany. A potpourri of Americana filled the interludes between songs. The first Negro airline stewardess led cheers. Norman Thomas, the old patrician Socialist, looked tearfully over the huge crowd and said, “I’m glad I lived long enough to see this day.”

  The warm-up music did not appeal to everybody, and great masses of people stepped off toward the Lincoln Memorial long ahead of schedule. Some sought good seats for the afternoon rally. Others were simply eager to march. Teenagers from Danville wore white sweatshirts and black armbands to signify racial injustice in their hometown, and another young group danced down Constitution Avenue with signs saying they had been arrested in Plaquemine Parish, Louisiana. Rustin’s crowd-control marshals lacked the numbers or the heart to hold them back. The streams of early marchers grew so thick that it required almost a military operation to create the illusion for posterity that King and the other sponsors had gone ahead of them all. Marshals waded in from the flanks in sufficient force to open a temporary wedge of space. The leaders squeezed in, locking arms against the dammed tide behind them, which held just long enough for news photographers to catch the scene from a flatbed truck.

  Mounted in the eagle’s eye of the Washington Monument, a CBS television camera showed viewers a thick carpet of people on both sides of the half-mile reflecting pool and all around the base of the Lincoln Memorial. At noon, nearly two hours before the rally began, the police estimated the crowd at more than 200,000. From this official number, friendly observers argued plausibly that late arrivals and high density justified talk of 300,000, and the usual effusions ran it upward to 500,000. By whatever count, the numbers reduced observers to monosyllabic joy. Within the movement, the gathering sea of placards and faces produced the most brain-numbing sight since the first ghost fleet of empty buses chugged through Montgomery.

  An ancient man reached halfway around the world to fix the historical moment: W. E. B. Du Bois had died in Ghana. In making the announcement over the huge loudspeakers at the march, Roy Wilkins had the grace to downplay the Communist apostasy of his old tormentor: “Now, regardless of the fact that in his later years Dr. Du Bois chose another path, it is incontrovertible that at the dawn of the twentieth century his was the voice that was calling to you to gather here today in this cause.” For those who revered Du Bois, news of his death that very morning came as a shockingly appropriate transition. Gone finally was the father of pan-Africanism, the NAACP, and the Negro intelligentsia. Taking his life’s jumbled status to the grave, Du Bois would receive a state funeral in Accra, a Marxist eulogy, and burial outside Christianborg Castle.

  Prosaic crises distracted the march leaders. King was preoccupied with the sensitivities of Fred Shuttlesworth, who, along with James Baldwin and other notables, was upset over his exclusion from the list of speakers. Once the leaders pushed their way up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, they confronted renewed brushfires over the latest draft of John Lewis’ speech. Walter Reuther was furious, saying that while Lewis was right to prod the Kennedy Administration, he was foolish to belittle the civil rights bill. Burke Marshall rushed from the Justice Department in the sidecar of a police motorcycle, bearing a revised draft that blunted Lewis’ criticisms of the government. Archbishop O’Boyle did not care so much about the Kennedy image, but he did consider the “scorched earth” language to be unacceptably violent in tone, and he refused to give the opening invocation unless changes were made.

  Bayard Rustin improvised with music to cover the chaotic dispute backstage, where rumors were flying and Ralph Abernathy kept running around telling everybody to be calm. Peacemakers shuttled between clumps of aggrieved speakers with compromise wordings. In the central huddle, Lewis and Roy Wilkins wound up shaking fingers angrily in each other’s faces until Rustin jumped in to appoint an emergency truce committee of Randolph, King, Lewis, and the Rev. Eugene Carson Blake, a prominent white clergyman from the National Council of Churches. While the committee retired for deliberations inside a guard station beneath the giant seat of the Lincoln statue, Rustin persuaded O’Boyle to go ahead with the invocation on the assurance that he would be shown the final Lewis text in time to walk off the platform if he found it unacceptable. Much to King’s relief, Rustin hustled Shuttlesworth out for an impromptu filler speech.

  Reverend Blake’s arrest in Baltimore gave him special status as the march’s only white speaker who had gone to jail in a civil rights demonstration, and to stress his commitment he submitted abjectly to the indictment that King had hurled at the white church from Birmingham (“We come late, late we come, in the reconciling and repentant spirit,” Blake declared that day to the marchers). Still, Blake was a forceful man—Eisenhower’s personal pastor—and no amount of contrition could make him a pushover. In the huddle, he objected vehemently to Lewis’ use of “revolution” and “the masses,” calling them terms of an alien dogma. When Randolph defended the words as perfectly proper, saying he had used them regularly for forty years, Blake shifted his attack to the “Sherman’s march” passage, which he insisted was contrary to the spirit of the entire march. Here he had better success. Lewis retreated to a defense of his right to choose his own words. King took this opening to doubt, correctly, that the “scorched earth” language was in fact Lewis’. “John, I know you as well as anybody,” he said. “That doesn’t sound like you.” The salvaged agreement was a bundle of irony. King changed a few words while insisting that it was merely an adjustment of style and context, not substance. James Forman, pecking furiously at a portable typewriter, deleted phrases he himself had added. Textual changes were trivial relative to the contention they spawned.

  The secret battle under Lincoln’s seat became a cherished, bitter legend within SNCC, full of accusations against those who had acquiesced in the demands for unity and “emasculated” Lewis’ speech. Some SNCC partisans nursed a commanding sense of separation, snickering at optimism that was miles wide and inches deep, like a desert lake. Essentially, the argument was about the proper mix of emotion to project to the world at this opportunity—anger, love, sadness, hope. Under pressure of time, extraordinary virtues were turning sour, as though human nature were demanding recompense for the saintly maturity of young movement people since the early sit-ins and freedom rides. Professing to be bored by the vapid emotions of the march, the students turned inward, alienated from hopes they themselves had largely created.

  Very little of the new undertow touched Lewis himself. When his turn came to face the vast host, he stepped forward to a long rumble of applause in tribute to the students of the movement. He began nervously, and in places he inserted a hint of a British accent to cover a slow, Alabama farm tongue, but the crowd soon warmed up his cadence. Even those who had never heard of C. B. King or James Farmer could
tell by the way he spoke their names that Lewis was personally acquainted with those being beaten and jailed. His authenticity stirred a crowd that was sleepy from a long afternoon’s drone of self-conscious speeches. From him, talk of living “in constant fear of a police state” did not seem extreme, and his refrain, “What did the federal government do?” came as a bracing dose of realism. Prophetically, he did not use the word “Negro,” and alone of the speakers talked of “black people” and “the black masses.” Crowd response swept him through difficult rhetoric of scolding, cold-eyed idealism:

  My friends, let us not forget that we are involved in a serious social revolution. By and large, American politics is dominated by politicians who build their careers on immoral compromises and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic, and social exploitation.

  There are exceptions, of course. We salute those. But what political leader can stand up and say, “My party is the party of principles”? For the party of Kennedy is also the party of Eastland. The party of Javits is also the party of Goldwater. Where is our party? Where is the political party that will make it unnecessary to march on Washington? Where is the political party that will make it unnecessary to march in the streets of Birmingham?

  Summoning up the will for a continuing march “until true freedom comes, until the revolution of 1776 is complete,” Lewis called off a long list of marching cities, and in doing so he achieved a preaching rhythm that he had practiced with barnyard chickens only a few years earlier.

  In a harbinger of a separate movement to come, there had been muffled contention over the role of women in the march. Without noticeable dissent, the planning committee barred Coretta King and the other wives of the male leaders from marching with their husbands. Diverting them to a separate procession down Independence Avenue, the committee scheduled no female speakers during the entire three-hour program. Yet women provided much of the afternoon’s historical resonance. In a “Tribute to Women,” Randolph introduced for bows what amounted to a women’s roll call of the movement: Rosa Parks, Daisy Bates, Diane Nash Bevel, Gloria Richardson of Cambridge, Maryland. Few in the audience recognized the shy widow of Herbert Lee, who had been slain two years earlier during SNCC’s first registration drive in Mississippi, but those who did cheered her all the more. Randolph also presented Josephine Baker, the expatriate singer who had flown in from Paris for the march wearing her Free French uniform. He introduced Marian Anderson to sing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” and finally, when the long procession of speakers had reduced the sun-drenched crowd to restless fatigue, he brought out Mahalia Jackson. Her first notes were a cry from the deepest wellsprings of culture. The song was “I Been ’Buked and I Been Scorned,” a spiritual born of the slave experience, but Jackson managed also to stir emotions irresistible to whites. People fumbled for handkerchiefs, and responsive cries chased the echoes of her a cappella voice through the cavernous outdoors.

  Rabbi Joachim Prinz of the American Jewish Congress received a smattering of polite applause when he followed Jackson to the microphone. There were scattered cries for King, who was next and last. Although the program was running nearly a half-hour ahead of schedule, by a miracle from Bayard Rustin, people ached to stretch limbs and escape sunstroke. They were ready to go home. When Randolph introduced King as “the moral leader of our nation,” small waves of applause lapped forward for nearly a minute in tribute to the best-known leader among them as well as to the end of a joyous day. Then the crowd fell silent.

  It was a formal speech, as demanded by the occasion and the nature of the audience. By then, ABC and NBC had cut away from afternoon soap operas to join the continuous live coverage by CBS. King faced also a giant press corps and listeners as diverse as the most ardent supporters of the movement and the stubborn Congress at the other end of the Mall, where by quorum calls sullen legislators “spread upon the Journal” the names of the ninety-two absent members who might have let the march distract them from regular business. For all these King delivered his address in his clearest diction and stateliest baritone. Ovations interrupted him in the cracks of infrequent oratorical flourish, and in difficult passages small voices cried “Yes!” and “Right on!” as though grateful and proud to hear such talk. From the front, a woman could be heard to laugh and shout “Sho ’nuff!” when King told them about the freedom checks that had bounced. Five minutes later, when King declared that the movement would not stop “as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and hotels of the cities,” a shout went up from a pocket of the crowd so distant that the sound did not reach King for a second or two.

  He recited his text verbatim until a short run near the end: “We will not be satisfied until justice runs down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” The crowd responded to the pulsating emotion transmitted from the prophet Amos, and King could not bring himself to deliver the next line of his prepared text, which by contrast opened its lamest and most pretentious section (“And so today, let us go back to our communities as members of the international association for the advancement of creative dissatisfaction”). Instead, extemporaneously, he urged them to return to their struggles (“Go back to Mississippi. Go back to Alabama…”), to believe that change would come “somehow” and that they could not “wallow in the valley of despair.”

  There was no alternative but to preach. Knowing that he had wandered completely off his text, some of those behind him on the platform urged him on, and Mahalia Jackson piped up as though in church, “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin.” Whether her words reached him is not known. Later, King said only that he forgot the rest of the speech and took up the first run of oratory that “came to me.” After the word “despair,” he temporized for an instant: “I say to you today, my friends, and 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…”

  Mindful of his audience, he held himself to a far more deliberate pace than in Detroit, or in Chicago the week before. Here he did not shout or smile, and there was no chance to build upon cascading rhythms of response, as in a mass meeting. The slow determination of his cadence exposed all the more clearly the passion that overshadowed the content of the dream. It went beyond the limitations of language and culture to express something that was neither pure rage nor pure joy, but a universal transport of the kind that makes the blues sweet. Seven times he threw the extremities of black and white against each other, and each time he came back with a riveting, ecstatic dignity.

  The “Dream” sequence took him from Amos to Isaiah, ending, “I have a dream that one day, every valley shall be exalted…” Then he spoke a few sentences from the prepared conclusion, but within seconds he was off again, reciting the first stanza of “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” ending, “‘from every mountainside, let freedom ring.’” After an interlude of merely one sentence—“And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true”—he took it up again: “So let freedom ring.” By then, Mahalia Jackson was happy, chanting “My Lord! My Lord!” As King tolled the freedom bells from New Hampshire to California and back across Mississippi, his solid, square frame shook and his stateliness barely contained the push to an end that was old to King but new to the world: “And when this happens…we will be able to speed up that day when all 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!’” With that King stepped suddenly aside, and the March tumbled swiftly to benediction from Benjamin Mays.

  Like most television viewers, President Kennedy was witnessing a complete King speech for the first time. “He’s damn good,” the President remarked to his aides at the White House. Kennedy was especially impressed with King’s ad lib off the prepared text, and he was quick to pick out the most original refrain
. As the principal leaders filed into the Cabinet Room from the march, he greeted King with a smiling “I have a dream,” as a fellow speechmaker who valued a good line. The compliment made King feel slightly uncomfortable, as he alone had been showered with hosannas all the way over from the Lincoln Memorial. Deflectively, King asked President Kennedy if he had heard the excellent speech of Walter Reuther. The latter indeed had delivered a fiery oration containing the day’s most pointed barbs at President Kennedy (“We cannot defend freedom in Berlin so long as we deny freedom in Birmingham!”), and the President in turn deflected mention of Reuther. “Oh, I’ve heard him plenty of times,” he replied.