“Living was tenuous in movement days, but the grasping at liberty, and the reaching toward happiness ennobled life for this nation’”

– James Farmer

By Lee A. Daniels

I.

There is no “battle for Dr. King’s legacy,” as one newspaper headline, intended to be attention-grabbing, put it this week. The legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and of the black freedom struggle was affirmed for all time at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963.

That is why the day of August 28 at the Lincoln Memorial belongs to the March on Washington of August 28, 1963. The ground and the very air there were hallowed that day for as long as humans inhabit the earth.

It belongs to the Beloved Community, earned as partial payment of that old promissory note owed to the generations of the people represented by the people who were there that day in person and in spirit.

And it is held in trust by their spiritual descendants who continue the work to, as Langston Hughes wrote, make America be America.

II.

In one sense, it seemed as if all of America was there that day – “a parade for human rights,” in the words of Roy Wilkins, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The marchers came from everywhere, brought by 2,000 chartered buses, and 10 chartered airplanes, and 21 chartered trains, and hundreds of cars, and, for more than a few groups, by marching from various points from the North as well as the South.

But, of course, a part of America was not there, did not want to be there, and fought mightily to prevent the United States from becoming a place where the things that marchers advocated could come to pass.

It’s easy to forget, in recalling that halcyon moment, what lay ahead.

Many difficult days.

Three weeks after the March, at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, in Birmingham, the forces of evil took their revenge for the March and for the Movement’s earth-shaking spring offensive in that city. The bomb that took the lives of four young black girls dressed in their Sunday-school finery on September 15 was the savages’ declaration: We’re going to kill more of you. And they would.

The road to the victories of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 would prove again that the black freedom struggle was fueled not only by a sense of soaring optimism. It was also fueled by stoicism – by knowing that profound sacrifice would be required of the great and ordinary alike. In the fight for Negro freedom the road to salvation was going to be hallowed by the blood of the righteous. Some of the innocents were going to lose their lives. I may not get there with you were the words the Apostle of Nonviolence would say on the last night of his life five years in the future. Those in the Beloved Community understood. That is why one of its many anthems drawn from the church declared: We are soldiers in the Army / We have to fight although we have to cry / We have to hold up the blood-stained banner / We have to hold it up until we die.

The two years after the March would be marked by the murders of some of those who had heeded the words spoken by The Preacher that day. He was “not unmindful,” he said, as a jolt of emotion coursed through the great throng, “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 storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality.” He charged those “veterans of creative suffering” to renew their hope and their faith and go back to those places in the North and the South where the work needed to be done “knowing that we will be free one day.”

Those two years would also see the emergence of an issue and a country many Americans then considered beyond the boundaries of concern of the Movement: Vietnam. On November 1, 1963 South Vietnam’s U.S.-backed puppet president was murdered in a brazen coup. But it seemed that Americans barely had time to grasp that something was terribly wrong in that land halfway around the world before the news bulletins were flashing from Dallas shortly after midday on Friday, November 22.

That day, and throughout that weekend, there began a different kind of march on Washington.

III.

Despite all that followed the March on Washington that fall and throughout the turbulent years that closed the 1960s; despite the continual attempts ever since to water down its exalted meaning and obscure the revolutionary power of King’s speech, the March of Washington of August 28, 1963 still gleams, jewel-like, on the roll of American history. Its declaration that some Americans do indeed hold certain truths to be self-evident remains the hope for the future of America.

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Editor In Chief of TheDefendersOnline.com