Martin Luther King and the March on Washington

MARTIN LUTHER KING: 'I have had to tell my children

about the segregation and what it means.

'My seven-year-old daughter, she wanted to go to Fun Town.'

'And we found it necessary'

to explain to her that she couldn't go to Fun Town

because she was coloured.

'To attempt to explain a system like the unjust and evil

'system of segregation to a six year-old child,

'is a very difficult thing.'

In 1963, the movement for civil rights came to the most

segregated city in the American South -

Birmingham, Alabama.

'Birmingham is a symbol of hard-core resistance to integration.'

It is the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States.

'It has had more unsolved bombings of negro homes

'and churches than any city in the United states.'

It's not like any other southern city, OK?

Birmingham is "Bombingham".

They have quarries, and down in the quarry business, you use dynamite.

So there are a lot of local people

who are expert in the use of dynamite.

A teenage boy riding a bicycle had been knocked off the bike

and castrated.

A young couple had gone to the city hall to get a wedding licence,

came around the corner and brushed shoulders

with a Birmingham policeman

and he pulled out his pistol

and pistol whipped the boy to the ground.

I mean, it was a horrible, heinous place.

The campaign was to be led by the organisation's

then 34-year-old leader, the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr.

It is immoral to urge people to accept

injustices of oppression and second-class citizenship

in an attempt to wait until the so-called opportune time.

The time is always right to do right.

Dr King was the voice of civil rights from the bus boycott on.

But by the end of 1962 he recognised that the civil rights movement

was losing what he called its window in history.

The South was still segregated

and he said, "We need to take more of a risk.

"We need to go for broke. I need to go for broke."

I think he felt that we have to be willing to give our lives

to put an end to segregation.

If we do, then segregation will end even if we die.

That was the reason he chose Birmingham.

'Before the victory's won, some may even have to face physical death.

'We must come to see that there are some things so eternally true,

'that they are worth dying for.'

And if a man has not discovered something that he will die for,

he isn't fit to live.

In January of 1963, one man was determined to stop King's

desegregation message from spreading any further.

Birmingham's police chief, Eugene "Bull" Connor.

The so-called Negro movement is a part of the attempted takeover

of our country by the lazy, the indolent, the beatniks,

the ignorant, and by some misguided religionists and bleeding hearts.

Do you think you can keep Birmingham

in the present situation of segregation?

I may not be able to do it, but I'll die trying.

# The Lord will see us through

# The Lord will see us through... #

Overcoming Bull Connor's segregationist zeal,

not to mention his jails, would take something special.

And in the winter of '63,

King would find out just how special that effort needed to be.

He spent all of January, February and March 1963,

training people to accept non-violence,

to go down into marches and be willing to go into Bull Connor's jails.

But Connor's jails were so fearsome that no matter how much

they exhorted people and no matter how many freedom songs they sang,

how many prayers they prayed, how much fervour there was in

the meetings, people wouldn't show up to risk going into those jails.

With the campaign paralysed by fear and defeat looming,

King put his reputation on the line.

Defying a city ban on demonstrations,

he led one from the front.

As King was led off to jail, a new group emerged from the shadows.

DOGS BARK IN THE DISTANCE

He's in jail - he doesn't know if the protests are going to

continue or whether Bull Connor's going to win.

Then the young people entered the Birmingham struggle.

# Ain't gonna let nobody turn me round

# Turn me round

# Turn me round... #

I don't mind coming to jail. I don't mind suffering at all.

-And I will suffer some more just for my freedom.

-I want equal rights.

I want equal rights.

# ..Marching up to freedom land. #

These young teenagers essentially saved the movement.

The violence against the civilised demonstrators was

going on spasmodically.

But Bull Connor and his dogs was on national television.

Everybody in America saw that.

And most everybody that saw it was shocked. Was really shocked.

The pictures were so shocking that it raised the moral issue of what

kind of nation is America?

Are we a country better than this?

As the Birmingham campaign escalated,

King moved around the country.

What he saw surprised him

and altered his thinking about the future of the movement.

Dr King came out of Birmingham, travelling around,

instead of going into towns

and giving a talk in the black church, there are 15,000

people at the airport and they're mixed, black and white.

He says, "We're on a breakthrough, we have to take advantage of this.

"We have to have a national protest.

"Call Philip Randolph and say his idea that he's been thinking about

"to revive and have a national march on Washington,

"we need to do it now."

A Philip Randolph was the founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, in the 1920s.

The sleeping car porters were black workers in the railroad industry.

There was a time that blacks did all kinds of work in the railroad industry,

but as the new technology came,

they were dismissed and whites took the job.

The one thing that could get organised

and remained African American, were the sleeping car porters.

Universally recognised as the dean of the Civil Rights Movement,

Randolph had earned that title in a 40-year fight for racial equality.

A Philip Randolph was in fact the first black leader to advocate mass action.

He understood that the only way to make progress in this country

was not only through mass action, but that you had to centre

your activity on Washington DC, on the Congress and on the President.

A Philip Randolph told me the story

when he was a young man leading demonstrations,

President Roosevelt and Mrs Roosevelt had invited him to dinner.

During the dinner, A Philip Randolph outlined all of the issues

and things that he thought that the President should act on

and be responding to.

By the time it ended, Roosevelt said, "Mr Randolph,

"for all that you have said here tonight, I'd ask you to please

"go out in your world and make me do what you have asked me to do."

A Philip Randolph went back to the people that he knew,

held a meeting and said, "We're going to march on Washington."

And the president signed the Fair Employment Practises Bill within days.

Negroes want the same things that white citizens possess.

All of their rights.

They want no reservations and no force under the sun can stem

and block and stop this civil rights revolution which is now under way.

Randolph would organise two further marches on Washington in the '50s.

On both he would be helped by another figure - Bayard Rustin.

Everybody knew Bayard was an organisational genius.

He had been a member of the Young Communist League,

he had been a conscientious objector during World War II.

He served 18 months in federal penitentiary for that.

And, of course, he was gay.

And he never hid that fact.

Rustin was also an old ally of Martin Luther King.

It was a relationship formed during the momentous event that launched King on the national scene -

the Montgomery bus boycott of 1956.

Mr Randolph spoke to Dr King in the early days

of the Montgomery bus protest

and suggested to him that Bayard would be a real help.

From that period through the 1960s,

Bayard was in virtual daily contact with Dr King.

At the height of the desegregation battle was Bull Connor's forces,

Rustin travelled to Birmingham.

And when Bull Connor turned the city's fire hoses on its black children,

Rustin was on hand giving advice.

One important piece of advice he would give

came in the form of a message from A Philip Randolph.

A Philip Randolph sent Bayard Rustin down

and said, "Look, rather than keep this a southern black movement,

"we need to organise a march on Washington

"that would make it a national movement."

Randolph had been stating in public that there may be

a need for another march on Washington in the early 1960s.

The Kennedy administration, which had come in with so much hope

for civil rights, had faltered

and was almost terminally hesitant to do things.

In 1960, John Fitzgerald Kennedy became the new president.

From the beginning, Kennedy's message of hope

and freedom struck a chord with many across the world.

At the height of his travels, the new president's commitment to

democratic values would also embolden many closer to home.

KING: 'I have already talked with the President about issuing

'a sort of second emancipation proclamation.'

The shape of the world today does not afford us the luxury

of such an anaemic democracy.

Two years into his presidency, however,

very little had happened on racial equality at home,

and many, including King, began to lose patience.

'President Kennedy has done some significant things

and at the same time,'

I must say that President Kennedy hadn't done enough,

and we must remind him that we elected him.

I had been involved with the relationship between Kennedy

and Martin Luther King.

When I saw King and Kennedy together,

the President let King know that it made no sense

to go forward in the first session of Congress

with the Civil Rights Bill.

When we left, Martin said,

"I hoped we at last had a President

"who had the intelligence to understand the problem,

"who had the political skills to solve it,

"and who had the passion to see it through."

He said, "I'm certainly convinced of the first two."

"And we'll just have to see what happens about seeing it through."

In June 1963,

events began to force the President's hand

in ways both tragic and entirely anticipated.

On June 12th, Medgar Evers is assassinated.

Also in June, Vivian Malone and James Hood

are students who had been admitted to the University of Alabama.

But the University of Alabama had refused to admit them.

The person refusing the students admission

was none other than the State Governor.

As Governor, I am the highest Constitutional Officer of the state

of Alabama, and I will be present to bar the entrance

of any negro who attempts to enrol at the University of Alabama.

When you have a Governor standing in the way of executing

a federal court order, any President is going to have to

take a stand on that.

That pushes Kennedy to recognise that he can't avoid this

issue any more.

As the university crisis unfolded,

the Kennedy administration also found itself

confronted by an equally urgent set of problems elsewhere.

All these demonstrations are breaking out in hundreds of cities.

200 people going to jail here, 500 people going to jail there.

His advisors came to him and said, "This is going to not die down.

"The only alternative is to bite the bullet

"and propose a bill to end segregation."

We are confronted primarily with a moral issue.

It is as old as the Scriptures

and is as clear as the American constitution.

We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it,

and we cherish our freedom here at home.

But are we to say to the world, and much more importantly,

to each other, that this is the land of the free, except for the negroes?

It is a remarkable speech in history,

in the sense that it was one more day's demonstrations

made him call his advisors in and say, "That's it.

"I want to propose this bill."

And his advisors said, "When?" And he said, "Tonight."

And they said, "What?!"

Next week I shall ask the Congress of the United States to act.

To make a commitment it has not fully made in this century,

to the proposition that race has no place in American life, or law.

By the time Kennedy made that speech,

King had already begun his post-Birmingham tour

across the country.

That tour would convince him that Randolph's march on Washington idea

was the best way forward, and he began to say so.

We are calling for a non-violent peaceful march on Washington.

CLAPPING

We want to go there, not by the hundreds, not by the thousands,

but by the hundreds of thousands.

We are determined to be free in '63.

In a way, you've got two streams coming together.

The political stream that Kennedy had making that speech,

and King's protest stream planning to have a march.

Now they've got a bill that the President has introduced

to have a march for.

Randolph wanted the march to be about jobs,

King wanted it to be about freedom.

Randolph is saying,

"We may need to march to try to push President Kennedy

"into doing the right thing, the same way we pushed

"President Roosevelt into doing the right thing in World War II."

On July 2nd 1963, the first meeting of the March On Washington Committee

would take place in New York.

For four months, Randolph had been planning for just such a meeting.

In January of 1963, Bayard and Norman Hill

and Tom Cohen drafted a memo to Mr Randolph, essentially saying,

"Now is the time for a march for jobs and economic freedom."

We met several times in Bayard Rustin's apartment,

and came up with a plan.

This plan, we presented to A Philip Randolph,

well before the critically important meeting

of the big six civil rights leaders

that actually decided and agreed that the march ought to take place.

A Philip Randolph, Negro American Labour Council.

Whitney Young, the National Urban League.

Roy Wilkins, the NAACP.

John Lewis, Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.

James Forman, Congress of Racial Equality.

And Martin Luther King Jr,

Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

The leaders of the six biggest Civil Rights organisations.

On July 2nd 1963, Randolph will chair their first meeting.

A march will be held on August 28th,

and it will have a two-fold purpose.

Number one, to arouse a conscience of the nation

on the economic plight of the negro

100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation.

And to demand strong forthright civil rights legislation,

the President's proposed Civil Rights Bill.

A Philip Randolph calls people together to New York

to meet about how are we going to stage this march,

and by June, they're meeting with President Kennedy.

We, as a group, were invited by Bayard Rustin,

along with A Philip Randolph,

to attend a meeting with President Kennedy, in late June of 1963.

It was in that meeting that A Philip Randolph spoke up.

"Mr President,

"we're going to march on Washington.

"The people are restless.

"The black masses are restless."

The Kennedy administration was a reluctant partner

when it came to the march.

The President feared that it might turn violent,

and if it did, it would kill any chance

for civil rights legislation getting through the Congress.

He tried his best to talk the leaders out of the march.

And when he found that they were not talkable-outable,

he joined the march.

Despite agreeing to support the march,

the President had something else on his mind that day.

President Kennedy took Dr King out into the rose garden,

and said that he was receiving a lot of pressure from the FBI

and others, that this movement was heavily infiltrated by communists.

He said, "The FBI has determined that there are two top communists

"from the Communist Party United States among your top advisors.

"They are Stanley David Levison and Jack Hunter Pitts O'Dell."

"And you have to get rid of them immediately."

I was operating two jobs - direct mail fundraising

and then I was director of voter registration.

So when President Kennedy told me we've got to fire Jack O'Dell,

Dr King said, "Well, I told Kennedy, I don't see where

"he got the time to be no communist, cos he's got two jobs with me.

"And both of them are full-time jobs."

Of the two men he was told to let go,

as a pre-condition for Kennedy's support of the march,

Stanley Levison was one that King had become especially reliant on.

PHONE RINGS

Levison and King had been close since the late 1950s.

Levison did all sorts of advising,

political counselling,

editorial advising for King.

Only in early 1962, did the FBI learn that Levison had become

a close friend of King's.

When the march on Washington was announced,

Hoover goes to Kennedy and tells him about what he knows

about Stanley Levison and his background.

And he wants to institute wiretaps

in order to see what kind of relationship exists

between Levison and King.

They began wiretapping Levison, with the support of the Kennedy brothers.

But, as of the summer of 1963,

they had produced not one scintilla of evidence

indicating that Levison had any sympathy for communism.

The wiretap on Stanley Levison became the predicate

for all of the wiretaps,

including the wiretaps on Martin Luther King,

including the wiretap on Bayard Rustin,

including the wiretap on Martin Luther King's lawyers.

By late July, innuendo and rumour from these wiretaps

would be news on Capitol Hill.

As the iconic figurehead of the impending march,

King was faced with a stark choice.

Lose Presidential support, or turn your back on two friends.

Jack O'Dell was finally let go.

But clearly, in order to demonstrate to the Kennedys

that we had severed our ties with quote - "a known communist".

Despite the removal of O'Dell,

the communist scare would dog plans for the march

throughout July of '63.

Fear of other possible controversies would also turn the selecting

of a march organiser into a major argument.

A Philip Randolph is determined to have his protege,

Rustin, be the organiser of the march.

But a lot of the other leaders felt that Rustin's very visible presence

would be a vulnerability for the movement.

Another aspect of Rustin's story

is that he has three strikes against him.

He's gay, he's red, and, you know, he's black.

So we had a caucus,

and we made a decision that we would recommend

that A Philip Randolph be the convenor.

So Mr Randolph, in his own way,

selected Bayard Rustin as his deputy.

Roy Wilkins said to Randolph, "You know his background.

"All the segregationists are going to use this to attack the march."

And Randolph said, "I will be responsible for him."

# How many roads must a man walk down

# Before they call him a man... #

Once Rustin was formally in place,

he and his staff had eight weeks to pull off

one of the biggest political demonstrations in American history.

# Listen, how many times

# Must the cannonballs fly...#

PHONE RINGS

March on Washington, may I help you, please?

Bayard Rustin, with the help of A Philip Randolph,

and a young woman by the name of Rachelle Horowitz,

put together the march.

# The answer is blowin' in the wind. #

Bayard set the tone.

Work began at about nine in the morning, ended at eleven at night.

Sundays was for staff meetings.

Nobody quit before Bayard quit.

PHONE RINGS

This was 50 years ago, so there was no e-mail,

there was no fax machine.

Bayard had asked that each civil rights organisation

loan two people to work on the staff.

PHONE RINGS

For a good six weeks, we worked six days a week and 18-hour days.

I don't ever remember coming in

before 10, 11 o'clock at night, you know?

Another figure who will play a crucial role is Norman Hill,

one of the original architects of the march.

Norman played an incredibly important role

when the march itself began.

He was the field organiser.

If one had to get...

Roy Wilkins, Jim Farmer, Whitney Young and SNCC

and John Lewis to say, "We're going to work and play well together..."

it was magnified on the local level.

What I actually did...

was travel...

from city to city by bus, train, or plane.

The purpose of my travelling was to organise

and develop local coalitions.

They would work to generate participation in the march

from their city.

March on Washington buttons right here for sale.

We're taking 25c donations for these buttons.

They would raise funds to enable those...

..lacking the means to go to Washington DC.

-MAN ON LOUDSPEAKER:

-Freedom Now Movement, hear me.

We are requesting all citizens to move into Washington,

to go by plane, by car, bus - any way that you can get there.

My job was to get as many black people from the south to come

up to Washington as possible.

I went out talking to groups of people.

I'd talk to them about the horrible violence

that accompanied the racism...

that I'd grown up with.

And they usually came back with enough to charter another bus.

Another figure who would prove invaluable

throughout July and August

is Hollywood star and entertainer Harry Belafonte.

-BELAFONTE:

-I went to California, spent endless days

talking to artists, some of the great profiles of the day.

I would then tell John Kennedy and others,

"You'll have such an array of superstars.

"There'll be so much high-profile presence."

-CHARLTON HESTON:

-We will march in Washington on August 28th 1963,

along with hundreds of thousands of our fellow Americans.

Harry was the pied piper and the conscience

of the civil rights movement in the arts community.

We will march because we recognise the events of the summer of 1963

as among the most significant we have lived through.

By simply getting them on the phone and talking to them,

he was able to persuade Charlton Heston,

who became the so-called "chairman".

-WOMAN:

-Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Lorraine Hansberry, Rita Moreno...

Marlon Brando, Shelley Winters,

James Garner, Steve McQueen...

Sammy Davis...Tony Bennett...

By early August, news of the impending march was everywhere,

but the responses were not always what the organisers anticipated.

When white Americans heard the idea of large numbers of black people

coming together in Washington, they immediately thought of riot.

Black people get together - riot.

They immediately thought,

"This is a terrible thing to do, they're going to do terrible things,

riot in the streets, there'll be fights, there'll be everything.

As the date of the march loomed,

a president about to propose a Civil Rights Bill

found himself increasingly drawn

into a spiralling fear of impending violence.

-JFK:

-We want citizens to come to Washington

if they feel that they're not having their rights expressed,

but, of course, arrangements have been made

to make this responsible and peaceful.

This is NOT a march on the capital.

Caught in a flurry of international dignitary visits,

the President sounded upbeat whenever pressed about the march.

Behind the scenes though, things were rather different.

-MAN:

-The original objective of the march was that it was supposed

to be outside Congress and the President -

particularly the Attorney General -

they were absolutely appalled, they were frightened.

There was very heavy debate on whether he should endorse it,

because the thought was it could become violent,

he would have sponsored a gathering of violence and it would be bad.

So, he signed an order which allowed for immediate implementation

of federal troops to be ready in case there was violence.

Part of what also happens with these meetings

with the Kennedy administration

is a decision to kind of moderate the idea.

If you're going to have a march on Washington,

have it well under control of established organisations

and, most of all, to have it a one-day march

and that everybody involved is out of town by sundown.

Those of us who were younger yelled at Bayard,

"How could you do this, give it up?"

And Bayard said, "Now, now, the more people we have,

"the better this march will be."

And so we went to plan B.

INDISTINCT GOSPEL SINGING

# Keep your eyes on the prize

# Hold on, hold on... #

August 27th, 1963. The night before the march.

The anticipation in the city was measurable,

you could feel it.

People did not have any sense of what might happen.

# Keep your eyes on the prize

# Hold on, hold on

# Hold on, hold on

# Keep your eyes on the prize

# Hold on... #

I'd finished my first year, and during that time,

when I began to hear there was going to be

this massive march on Washington,

I didn't know how I was going to get there,

but I definitely wanted to be there.

I managed to find a ride with an NAACP group

that was leaving from Indianapolis on the night before the march.

The bus ran overnight, so I didn't get a lot of sleep.

Daybreak, August 28th, 1963,

the morning of the march.

We went on over to the march site.

There weren't many people there when we got there.

I remember... I was just saying,

"I hope they come, I hope they come."

We got up at the crack of dawn and I made the banners for the buses.

You're a teenager and you know that this is something

you need to do just because all of these people around you

are inspired and inspiring you...

to do all of this.

# We shall overcome

# We shall overcome... #

Once we got out of Jersey,

then you're hitting Philadelphia and Delaware -

you're into dangerous territory.

The plane will leave at midnight.

You will arrive in Washington at 9am in the morning.

When we arrive at 9am, there will be a press conference

with our group as well as the people coming in from New York.

-BELAFONTE:

-We chartered planes that came from California,

trains that came from New York and everywhere,

ladened with the greatest artists

that they would close the theatres on Broadway.

Some of the studios suspended shooting for the day.

So these stars from...

I mean, the most, the most visible, to show up.

It wasn't until, I guess, about 7.30-8.00

that we saw people coming up the hill,

that we breathed a sigh of relief.

They're here.

People kept coming and coming and coming.

And we knew, from the moment...

The moment the crowds began to arrive that we had a success.

RHYTHMIC CLAPPING AND CHANTING

As you came toward the Washington Mall,

you began to notice the buses with signs on it.

And you got a sense that something really special was happening.

INDISTINCT SINGING

I remember watching the first arrivals.

It was my first major assignment

and it was all fairly basic equipment

and not knowing whether it would work,

I began to feel nauseated and I started sipping Coca Cola

and chewing Tums and nothing helped

and I went down off the steps into the boxwood and I threw up.

-MAN:

-What do we want now?

-# Freedom. #

Freedom, freedom, freedom.

-TV REPORTER:

-The long-awaited march for jobs and freedom

on Washington DC has started

and it started early without its scheduled leaders.

About ten minutes ago, the march began.

# We are not afraid... #

I tell you, when I began to really feel good

was when Joan Baez sang We Shall Overcome.

You just felt, "This is it, this is OK, this has got it."

And you could feel everybody going, yes!

# We shall overcome... #

It was in some ways my best contribution

to the civil rights movement.

When I was making what I called "salt and pepper audiences".

People come to me years and years later

saying they were standing next to somebody from the school,

holding hands, singing We Shall Overcome.

Those stories are so moving to me.

SONG: "If I Had a Hammer"

By 9.30, 40,000 people were at the meeting point of the march.

# I'd hammer out danger

# I'd hammer out a warning... #

Cars and buses had arrived from Alabama, Mississippi

and every other southern state.

By ten o'clock, 972 chartered buses

and 13 special trains carrying 55,000 people had left New York.

By 10:30, 100 buses an hour would be arriving in Washington.

# Well, I got a hammer

# And I got a bell

# And I got a song to sing... #

We call and ask you to assemble and begin the march for freedom now.

Despite the growing numbers,

not everything was going according to plan with the march.

As the thousands moved towards the second site,

a simmering dispute over one of the speeches

threatened to derail all of the hard work.

John Lewis showed copies of the speech to me and to Bayard.

And we loved it.

We thought it was the greatest thing in the world.

CHANTING: Freedom, freedom.

There's a young man who worked on our staff, Courtland Cox,

and there was a press table,

and I remember Courtland rushing past me saying,

"I'm going to put John's speech on the press table."

And I said, "Don't do it."

# He's got the whole world in his hands... #

The first call that Mr Randolph got

was from Archbishop O'Boyle.

O'Boyle said he would not do the invocation if John gave a speech.

That hit us like a ton of bricks.

For us it was a collective statement for SNCC

and not John's speech alone.

I was very upset about it, we all were.

With the march in progress,

threats of a boycott also arrive from another unexpected quarter.

Aspects of John Lewis's speech

had so alarmed some members of the march committee

that they too were threatening to walk.

In the text, I've suggested

that if we did not see meaningful progress

the day may come where we may be forced to march to the South,

the way Sherman did, non-violently.

And the other leaders said, "No, no, you can't use that, John,

"that is too inflammatory."

Randolph said, "You know, even though I sympathise

"with a lot of the things you're saying,

"you're going to have to change it."

He said, "I've been trying to achieve this march

"since before you were born...

"and I don't want to see it ruined right on the eve of this march."

We got to the Lincoln Memorial and the programme had started,

and Jim Forman of SNCC and John were there

and they were working out

what could be taken out without compromising it.

And virtually until the last-minute they were both working on it.

# We shall not

# We shall not be moved. #

Assured that the speech would be changed,

Archbishop O'Boyle agreed to the invocation.

Our Father who art in Heaven,

we who are assembled here in a spirit of peace and in good faith

dedicate ourselves and our hopes to you.

We ask the fullness of your blessing upon those

who have gathered with us today.

By lunchtime over 150,000 people had assembled.

And cars, coaches and trains still kept coming.

In the sweltering August heat,

performers and speakers took to the stage.

By early afternoon over 200,000 had filled the Mall,

one of the largest demonstrations in American history.

# Like the stillness in the wind before the hurricane begins

# The hour that the ship comes in... #

For 100 years the negro people

have searched for first class citizenship.

I believe that they cannot and should not wait until

some distant tomorrow, they should demand freedom now.

Here and now.

I have some 1,500 names here.

There you would see Burt Lancaster one minute and Robert Ryan the next,

Paul Newman, James Baldwin and Lena Horne

and Sidney Poitier.

Everywhere you looked there was these...

nuggets of celebrity.

Everywhere you looked,

you saw black and white people.

It was a great feeling to be privy to that,

to see it, and to see the mix of colours

who were there

putting themselves on the block, to say, "I am who I am."

That's why they came.

That's why I went.

# I've

# Been buked... #

By late afternoon,

John Lewis had finished making changes to his speech

and he was ready to be introduced by A Philip Randolph.

I have the pleasure to present to this great audience

brother John Lewis.

I went straight to the podium

and I looked straight ahead.

I said, "This is it."

And I went for it.

Hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here

for they are receiving starvation wages or no wages at all.

The fact that John Lewis gave

the second most talked about speech at that march

that was unique for many reasons,

among them little cultural things - he didn't use the phrase "negro",

he said black people.

We must get in this revolution and complete the revolution.

For in the delta of Mississippi and southwest Georgia,

in the black belts of Alabama,

in Harlem, in Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia,

and all over this nation,

the black masses are on the march for jobs and freedom.

# Lord, if you lead

# Lord, if you lead your child

# I cannot make it alone... #

Finally, the man most people had come to hear...

Dr Martin Luther King.

It was the first time most Americans heard a complete King speech,

it was televised from start to finish.

Here you heard a whole speech in which he was speaking

not just for the aims of black people,

but for the destiny of American democracy.

Five score years ago...

..a great American in whose symbolic shadow we stand today...

..signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

100 years later...

..the negro still is not free.

America has given the negro people a bad cheque,

a cheque which has come back marked "insufficient funds."

I was nine years old

and from what I had gathered from the zeitgeist,

from family members, my community,

I knew that this moment

was going to be a seminal moment for us.

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...

We all saw that there was no fear,

we saw his value system,

his point of view about us all as human creatures.

Once we saw that in him,

our instincts moved us closer.

No, we are not satisfied

and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like water

and righteousness like a mighty stream.

As he got to the end of his speech, Mahalia Jackson kept saying,

"Tell them about the dream, Martin.

"Tell them about the dream."

I'm standing about 50 feet behind Dr King.

And I watched his demeanour change.

And I turned to the person next to me and I said,

"These people don't know it,

"but they're about ready to go to church."

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.

All of the speeches that he'd ever made

came together in that one moment

and the best of every speech was to be now revealed

in the context of this great historical moment.

I have a dream...

..that my four little children...

..will one day live in a nation

where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin

but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

Let freedom ring.

From every mountainside, let freedom ring,

and if America's to be a great nation

this must become true.

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 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!

Being there is one of the highlights of my life.

I felt clear about being an American

and being a black American.

What Dr King was saying

was really so simple.

Everything that has happened to me,

my ability to be liberated,

completely free,

determining my own destiny,

owning myself,

happened because of that moment.

The Kennedys were worried

the very moment the march appeared as a realistic possibility.

But after the big event, the leaders of the march go to the White House.

This is a coming together of the black civil rights movement

and the Kennedy administration.

President Kennedy stood in the door to the Oval Office

and he greeted each one of us, he shook our hands.

One by one he said,

"You did a good job, you did a good job."

NINA SIMONE: I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free

Ten hours after it began,

the event that would change American politics for ever was over.

As the crowds made their way back,

the reverberations of that day would be felt all over the world.

# And I should say

# Say 'em loud, say 'em clear

# For the whole round world to hear... #

One of the things that King's dream makes clear

is that once we start dreaming of a better world

and start making that better world,

things that we thought were impossible become possible.

And that is an inspiration.

# I wish you could know

# What it means to be me

# Then you'd see and agree

# That every man should be free

# I wish I could give

# All I'm longin' to give

# I wish I could live

# Like I'm longing to live

# I wish I could do

# All the things that I can do... #

This man who was never elected to any public office,

is now standing more than 30 feet tall

between President Jefferson and President Lincoln.

And sometimes when I'm flying out of Washington,

I look down and see the monument of Martin Luther King Jnr.

It says something about the man

and it says something about this country,

the distance we've come and the progress we've made.

# And I sing cos I know, yeah

# I know how it feels

# I know how it feels to be free

# Yeah, yeah... #

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