“In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s Capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
“It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check; a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt…. So we’ve come to cash this check—a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. We’ve also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of Democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood….
“But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny….
“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 our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating ‘for whites only.’ We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.”
As he spoke, thousands of people were clapping and shouting in cadence with him. And then on a surge of emotion, more inspired than he had ever been in his life, King abandoned his text and spoke from his heart, saying what he had truly wanted to say, his aides responding in delight, “Tell it, doctor!” “Awright!”
“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 that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident—that all men are created equal.’ I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
“I have a dream today.
“I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, that one day, right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.
“I have a dream today.” Below him, people had joined hands and were swaying back and forth, crying out to him, “Dream some more.”
“I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.
“This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.
“This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning ‘My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside let freedom ring.’ And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania…. But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and mole hill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
“When we allow freedom to ring, 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!”
In a crescendo of shouts and applause, King stepped down from the podium numb with emotion. Abernathy embraced him and said that the Holy Spirit had taken hold of him in that speech. And Walker congratulated him, too, going on about how he “just went on into that thing.” With the crowd still roaring, march marshals formed a circle around him to keep him from being mobbed. Now Coretta was at his side, slipping her arm into his, as they made their way through an ocean of people. A British journalist managed to speak to him in all the din. He thought King’s speech “the most moving and magnificent public address I have ever heard.”
And if there were voices of dissent that day (Malcolm X dismissed the whole scene as “the Farce on Washington”), James Baldwin captured the overwhelming sentiment: “That day, for a moment, it almost seemed that we stood on a height, and could see our inheritance; perhaps we could make the kingdom real, perhaps the beloved community would not forever remain that dream one dreamed in agony.”
There was a reception in the White House afterward. “The President was bubbling over with the success of the event,” Wilkins recalled, and was relieved that nothing untoward had happened. “All smiles,” he shook King’s hand vigorously and said, “I have a dream.” When he learned that the Negro leaders had not had lunch, the President ordered sandwiches and beverages brought up from the White House kitchen, and they all sat around eating and chatting amiably in the afterglow of an unforgettable day.
Back at the Willard that evening, King was “totally outside of himself with elation,” Rustin remembered, “but not about himself.” He was happy because Mr. Randolph had finally gotten his mass march, the march he had dreamed of leading back in 1941 and again in 1947. For King, it was not his hour; it was Mr. Randolph’s hour. He sought out the grand old man and congratulated him warmly for getting his march “after all these years.”
Later, King relaxed in his suite with Coretta and members of his staff, who teased him for ex
ceeding his allotted time at the rostrum and warned him to “watch out for Roy now.” They talked for hours about the day’s events, and King finally allowed himself a little personal contentment. Millions of whites had heard his message for the first time, heard what he’d been trying to say since Montgomery. More than that, he had spoken that day as a modern Lincoln, taking his theme from the Gettysburg Address of one hundred years before. At Gettysburg, Lincoln had called for a national rededication to the proposition that all men were created equal, a determination to fight for a new birth of freedom so that government by and for all the people might endure. Now King had stood at Lincoln’s statue, reminding Americans in 1963 that they too had a commitment to a new birth of freedom.
At a small interracial breakfast the next morning, King was still in high spirits. “Now I want y’all to have a good southern breakfast,” he told his companions. “What’s a good southern breakfast?” one of them asked. “Well,” King said, “we’re gonna have steak and eggs and home fried potatoes and grits and cornbread. I’ve already ordered it.” A waitress entered the room to find out how they wanted their steaks cooked. As she went around the room, the Negroes ordered theirs medium or well done, but the whites all wanted theirs rare. King turned to Rustin with a grin. “You see, Bayard, now I know why these white folks are so vicious. They eats too much rare meat.”
That day newspapers at home and abroad carried reports of the Washington march and excerpts from King’s speech, and editorial notices outside the South were almost all favorable. Journalist David Halberstam caught the art in King’s performance and later said that the affair reminded him of “a great televised morality play.” But along with accounts of the march came news that W. E. B. Du Bois, the celebrated Negro intellectual, co-founder of the NAACP and longtime editor of Crisis, historian and author among many other books of the inimitable Souls of Black Folk and Black Reconstruction, was dead in Ghana at ninety-five. King had exchanged correspondence with him during the Montgomery bus boycott, and Du Bois had praised King as “honest, straight-forward, well-trained, and knowing the limits.” But Du Bois had given up on America, so embittered in his later years that he had become a Communist and an expatriate, brooding on the tragedy of the age: “not that men are poor—all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked—who is good? Not that men are ignorant—what is truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men.”
SOMETIME THE MARCH, King entertained friends of both sexes in his suite at the Willard; Coretta was no longer with him. King had always been a passionate man, and his feelings were still running high from his oratory and the response of the crowd. What he did not know was that a hidden microphone, installed by somebody in authority (Robert Kennedy and two of his associates later pointed to the Washington Police Department), was recording the party—and what happened afterward.
A tape of the recording found its way into the hands of J. Edgar Hoover and his deputies at FBI headquarters. The Justice Department later acknowledged that the tape indicated “sexual activity” in King’s room. This, of course, was more than Hoover could bear. He already abhorred King, convinced as he was that this increasingly influential Negro was concealing Communist affiliations. True, the FBI’s security investigation had turned up no evidence of Communist influences on King or the civil-rights movement, and William Sullivan, head of the bureau’s Domestic Intelligence Division, had recently filed a report and a memo to that effect.* Hoover was furious. “This memo reminds me vividly of those I received when Castro took over Cuba,” he berated Sullivan. “You contended then that Castro and his cohorts were not Communists and not influenced by Communists. Time alone proved you wrong.” Sullivan knew better than to question his imperious boss. “The Director is correct,” Sullivan reported after the march on Washington. “We were completely wrong about believing the evidence was not sufficient to determine some years ago that Fidel Castro was not a Communist.” As for King, “I believe in the light of King’s powerful demagogic speech yesterday he stands head and shoulders over all other Negro leaders put together when it comes to influencing great masses of Negroes. We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of Communism, the Negro, and national security.”
That was exactly what the director wanted to hear. And now here was the Willard Hotel tape, proving to Hoover’s satisfaction that King was a philanderer who copulated with white as well as black women. Doubtless he had already heard rumors and allegations to that effect (Governor Wallace had recently warned the President himself that King was a “faker” who slept with “nigger women, and white and red women too,” and local police officials, bugging King’s hotel rooms, may have taped evenings similar to that at the Willard). A confirmed bachelor who dined alone with his cherished lieutenant, Clyde Tolson, Hoover was obsessed with the sexual behavior of those in public life. For him, extramarital sex was vile enough. But interracial sex was “moral degeneracy.” In Hoover’s eyes, in the eyes of his hand-picked deputies, King was a frightening specter, a reprobate and a subversive who masqueraded as a moral leader of the nation and who won over a lot of white people—including the President and the Attorney General—with his hypocritical cant about love and nonviolence. Now more than ever this menace had to be stopped. In righteous indignation, the director stepped up the bureau’s flow of anti-King memos to Robert Kennedy. At the same time, Hoover discovered that King had resumed his association with Stanley Levison and “joyously” informed Kennedy so. On October 7, at the director’s instigation, the bureau officially requested permission to tap King’s phones.
All this created a dilemma for the Attorney General. He was certain that the FBI was right, that Levison was a secret official of the Communisty party, and that King’s connections with Levison damaged the civil-rights movement, and “also damaged us.” Like the President, Kennedy genuinely admired King’s leadership and had no doubts about his own patriotism. But he was irked by King’s indifference to the FBI’s accusations and his carelessness about associating with men Kennedy thought were Communists. If Hoover wanted to, he had enormous power to hurt King, the Kennedys, and the civil-rights bill, which was in enough trouble as it was. “To protect ourselves,” Kennedy said, he now took a fateful step. On October 10, 1963, he authorized the FBI to put a wiretap on King’s home phone in Atlanta, and subsequently approved taps on SCLC’s phones as well. But Kennedy made it clear that the taps were to be conducted strictly on a thirty-day trial basis, after which they would be evaluated and the question of continued surveillance decided.
How could the Attorney General justify such blatant invasion of King’s privacy? If the taps indicated Communist activity in King’s circle, Kennedy could confront him with the evidence and force King to sever all ties with Levison and any other Communist friends, thus protecting King’s and the Kennedys’ reputations. If the taps proved King innocent of Communist associations, then the FBI would have to leave him and Kennedy both alone.
Hoover now went to work on King with a vengeance, ordering his men to establish a wiretap command post in Atlanta and send bureau headquarters tapes of all they overheard. Acting on a recommendation by Sullivan, Hoover even had an eleven-page monograph compiled which not only stressed King’s Levison connection, but indicted him as “an unprincipled man” in his personal life, apparently citing details from the Willard Hotel party. Though one of his own lieutenants warned that this could be construed as “a personal attack” on King, Hoover replied, “We must do our duty.” Out went copies to the Attorney General, the White House, the secretaries of State and Defense, the CIA, and the military.
For his part, Robert Kennedy was truly shocked by the FBI’s revelations. But he did not think King’s private life affected his integrity as a public figure and regarded the monograph as a “very, very unfair” picture of King. Unhappy with the FBI for circulating it, he phoned Hoover and told him to retrieve all copies of the document. Bitterly the director
did as he was told. But he hated the Attorney General for trying to control his bureau (Kennedy had even had the audacity to say that he should hire more Negroes). Well, Hoover wasn’t going to sit idly by while that loathsome preacher ran amuck with women and Communists. That winter, the FBI devised a secret plan to expose King as “a fraud, demagogue, and scoundrel,” as Agent Sullivan put it, “to take him off his pedestal and to reduce him completely in influence.”
At this juncture, King and his men knew nothing about Hoover’s hatred of him personally or about the FBI’s ghoulish campaign to pry into his personal affairs. But apparently somebody in the government did alert them to the wiretaps authorized by the Attorney General. “We knew they were…bugging our phones,” Andrew Young said later; “but that was never really a problem for us…. When you were anxious about your life, civil liberties seemed a tertiary consideration. In our conduct of a nonviolent movement there was nothing that we did not want them to know anyway.” What was more, neither King nor his lieutenants held the wiretaps against Robert Kennedy. The McCarthy period hadn’t been over very long, as Levison said, and they understood that the administration was frightened of “a terrible political scandal.”
ON SUNDAY MORNING, SEPTEMBER 15, King preached at Ebenezer Church, still glowing from the triumph of the Washington march. Then came devastating news from Birmingham. While King was at his pulpit in Atlanta, a bomb made of dynamite exploded in Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church—a center for rallies and marches during the recent campaign—and four Negro girls were dead. In despair, King rushed to Birmingham and wandered about in the church wreckage talking with people. From what he could gather, four hundred Negroes were gathered here for Sunday worship, and the girls—Denise McNair, age eleven, and Cynthia Wesley, Carol Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins, all fourteen—were at the back of the church, putting on their choir robes, when the dynamite went off and blasted them into eternity. The explosion blew a hole in the side of the church, too, and sent people screaming into the streets. Out of the hole stumbled a twelve-year-old girl, her hands covering her blinded eyes. A woman stood in a glass-littered street and wept, “My God, we’re not even safe in church!” Negroes searching in the rubble found a bloodstained copy of a kindergarten leaflet containing the day’s prayer: “Dear God, we are sorry for the times we were so unkind.”
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