The 14th Street bus trip from our neighborhood to downtown Washington often causes me to think of Martin Luther King, Jr. Usually I think of King because of the street's vacant lots and burned-out buildings that stand as a reminder of black Washington's explosion of grief and rage when King was killed. Today many of those desolate intersections and abandoned storefronts are the stomping grounds of heroin addicts. The inscription for this monument to dreams deferred is found spray-painted on a wall by one vacant lot. It reads simply, "Ain't no freedom in this damned land."
But on Saturday morning, August 27, 14th Street was a different place. For a while the memory of King's death was replaced by the bright hope and promise of his life as people emptied out of the apartment buildings and row houses to join the Twentieth Anniversary March on Washington for Jobs, Peace, and Freedom.
At 7:45 that morning the downtown bus was already as full as it would be at the peak of a workday rush hour. And at each stop along the way there was another cluster of people with sun hats and Thermos jugs ready to march in the 95 degree heat. There were older people for whom the march 20 years ago had been but one signpost in a long search for freedom. And there were younger people who were taking this opportunity to connect themselves to a proud history and to make a plea for their future. There were black mothers and fathers herding along their excited children. And there were even Rastafarians who would probably not have a kind word for any Christian preacher except King.
We were all going downtown that day for the same reason. We were going to honor history and, we hoped, to make some. We were going to remember the day Martin Luther King proclaimed his dream of a nation free from the scourge of racism and injustice. And we wanted to proclaim dramatically that dream again in the face of a government that seems determined to trample it in the dust.
By the time we reached the Lincoln Memorial, there were 300,000 of us, a number at least equal to the attendance at the 1963 march. And, to no one's surprise, as the day wore on King's unseen presence dominated the proceedings as surely as he had in person 20 years ago. His life and his words were constantly invoked from the podium, leading up to the climactic playing of a tape of the "I Have a Dream" speech.
His presence was also felt in the leading role of his widow, Coretta Scott King, and in the participation of numerous family members. But perhaps most significantly, King's spirit and insight were reflected in the nature of the march and its contemporary political aspirations.
The 1963 march was one for "jobs and freedom" with the main emphasis on the passage of basic civil rights legislation. The 1983 march had as its theme "jobs, peace, and freedom," and its agenda incorporated King's later insight that the full realization of his dream would require a frontal assault on what he called "the giant triplets of racism, militarism, and materialism." As a result, the New Coalition of Conscience that planned the march grew to include disarmament and anti-intervention groups, feminist organizations, labor unions, and Hispanics as well as a broad range of black and white churchpeople. The breadth of the coalition insured that the march would draw a racially and politically diverse crowd. For all its diversity, however, the march rightly remained a black-led event; at least two-thirds of the marchers came from the black community.
The danger always exists that a broadly inclusive coalition like the one assembled for the march on Washington will degenerate into the aimless "Ad-hoc Coalition Against Everything" of movement satire. The Coalition of Conscience founders recognized that risk and addressed it in their founding statement saying, "Our coalition is not a collection of single-issue groups brought together for tactical advantage, rather it is a community and a movement brought together by a common dream and human values."
With a few inevitable exceptions, that unified spirit did seem to dominate the gathering on the mall. Several of the speakers invoked the kind of radical moral vision that can integrate seemingly diverse concerns. One example was the speech made by John Lewis, formerly president of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and now an Atlanta City Council member. Lewis called the crowd to its "moral responsibility as children of God" to make peace, establish justice, preserve the earth, and build the "beloved community."
Some of the speeches, however, did contain enough of the flavor of special interest politics for the media to home in on the "disunity" angle. As a result, Congressman Walter Fauntroy, a chief organizer of the march, spent the rest of the weekend reminding reporters that 300,000 people came to Washington because they agreed on a basic agenda for social change.
What Fauntroy called the "first steps" in that agenda are found in the legislation the New Coalition of Conscience is promoting. The package includes a bill to create a million community-service jobs, a nuclear freeze and deep cuts in defense spending, a new fair-housing law, the King holiday bill, and measures to obstruct U.S. assistance to South Africa.
But the Coalition's legislative agenda received only passing attention at the Lincoln memorial. That was unfortunate because it could have given the event a more unified focus. And while those proposals obviously won't usher in a new age of peace and plenty, they are the kind of serious and conceivably winnable first steps upon which a movement can build.
Rather than emphasizing what the coalition is for, on August 27 the speakers spent much of their time attacking President Reagan and calling for his defeat in 1984. The heavy emphasis on the 1984 election caused one reporter to characterize the march as "a dress rehearsal for the Democratic convention." The description was exaggerated, but it is accurate enough to warn of some pitfalls movements for justice and peace face in the election year ahead.
The temptation to concentrate on Reagan is almost irresistible, especially when his policies have had such a galvanizing effect in mobilizing the black community and the peace movement. And certainly turning Reagan out of office is a worthy goal. But to claim, as some at the march did, that Reaganism is an aberration that can be wiped away in 1984 is to raise false hopes.
Many of the earmarks of Reaganism (higher unemployment, domestic cutbacks, increased military spending, and Cold War bellicosity) were present to some degree in the last 18 months of the Carter administration. It is likely that Reaganism is not an aberration but a symptom of a basic shift in U.S. politics. The day of old-style Democratic liberalism has passed. The need now is for solutions that go beyond liberalism to challenge the basic assumptions of a system based on greed and militarism.
Without strong pressure from a grassroots movement for such radically new directions, the Democratic alternative in 1984 will be only Reaganism with a human face. The march on Washington did assemble the elements for such a movement, and that was an important beginning.
In fact, even with all its emphasis on an event 20 years ago, the march on Washington was most significant as a day for beginnings. It was a new beginning for racial reconciliation in the movement as all over the country preparations for the march built bridges between black and white activists that can be walked over again. A sense of beginning was also present in the participation of many young black students who were, perhaps for the first time, picking up the mantle of the freedom movement. And it was a time of beginning for many peace activists recently awakened by the nuclear threat who were exposed for the first time to their movement's roots in the civil rights struggle. All the different movements and organizations supporting the march, and the nation as a whole, will be strengthened and blessed if the relationships begun for that day are allowed to grow and deepen.
The new beginning that was made August 27 could only have come at the initiative of black leadership. Martin Luther King was not the first black leader to realize that the black freedom struggle is ultimately a fight for America's soul. As black historian Vincent Harding points out, the black freedom movement has historically been the moral vanguard and the spiritual driving force of broader movements for freeing and humanizing change in the United States. That is true because the racism that poisoned the nation's very founding is still its Achilles' heel.
Whenever the United States' subjugation of blacks and other people of color is seriously challenged everything else about the society comes under question. Conversely no hope exists for other changes in the system if its essential racism is not confronted. That is why Martin Luther King's dream struck such a resonant chord throughout the nation 20 years ago, and why his voice was one that had to be heeded or silenced. That is also why 15 years after his death, King's voice could still draw 300,000 people to Washington and bring hope even to the 14th Streets of America.
King's voice still brings us hope that the United States might yet hear the call of conscience. It rekindles our hope that the patient practice of what King called nonviolent "soul force" can bring conversion and transformation and that, out of a struggle rooted in faith, the beloved community can emerge. The echoes of King's voice can revive our hope and our faith in what may be possible for the children of God.
Danny Collum was an associate editor of Sojourners magazine when this article appeared.
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