After noting that a hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation blacks were “still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination,” that the nation had “defaulted” on the promissory note of the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness due “her citizens of color,” and after warning against “the tranquilizing drug of gradualism,” Mahalia Jackson yelled out from speakers’ row: “Tell ’em about the ‘Dream,’ Martin, tell ’em about the ‘Dream’!” When 250,000 people marched on Washington last Saturday to mark the 50th anniversary of the march, many had another slain black teenager on their mind: Trayvon Martin, the unarmed 17-year-old shot by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Fla., as Martin was returning from a convenience store run for Skittles and iced tea, and after Zimmerman, finding the hoody-clad Martin suspicious, pursued him.Īdcode+King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is not as well known as the fact that half of it was an improvisation.
Milam, who were declared not guilty by an all-white jury in 67 minutes despite overwhelming evidence of their guilt. The date was itself a grim anniversary: that of the kidnapping, torture and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955 by Roy Bryant and his half brother J.W. delivered the “Dream” speech now engraved alongside the Gettysburg Address and the Declaration of Independence as markers of the nation’s conscience. It was toward the end of a sweltering August day and dozens of speeches that Rev. said from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. ‘Not an end, but a beginning,’ Martin Luther King Jr.