Admiration for La Pasionaria as a speaker and an anti-fascist, at which she showed by turns brilliance and courage, has to be tempered by the fact that she remained a devotee of Stalin long after even the Communist Party itself began to recognise his crimes. During her four decades in the Soviet Union she provided a reliable stream of propaganda at choreographed congresses throughout the Soviet bloc. She was always an apologist for the attitude Auden named in his poem ‘Spain’ and that he later disavowed as dishonest and rhetorical: ‘the conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder’.
La Pasionaria returned to Spain in 1977, two years after the death of Franco. She was greeted on her return by crowds who chanted ‘Si si, si, Dolores está aqui’. The Spanish Communist Party was made legal once again in 1975 and La Pasionaria was re-elected to the Spanish Parliament, for Asturias, the region she had represented forty years before. Age and infirmity meant she did not last long. Neither did her beloved party. By 1982, the Spanish Communist Party had been decisively rejected by voters and promptly split into three amid the usual arcane quarrels.
For all the failure, though, it was a mark of her impact that there were still people who thought that it was only with the return of La Pasionaria that the Spanish Civil War could be said to be over. She died on 12 November 1989, three days after the Berlin Wall fell, three days after the cause to which she had devoted her life suffered its desperate defeat. The literal translation of her autobiography was The Only Way. But communism was not the only way. It was a via dolorosa. La Pasionaria’s was a remarkable life, on the right side of the century’s first great rift but then on the wrong side of the second. She became a symbol of the reconciliation of the Spanish nation but, for all her rhetorical brilliance, the link she never understood was the one between freedom and capitalism. She thought that the system of enterprise and fascism were allies and that communism was the cure for both. La Pasionaria never understood that she had traded one sickness for another.
MARTIN LUTHER KING
I Have a Dream
The March on Washington
28 August 1963
If there is a single person who answers Cicero’s description of the ideal orator then that man is Martin Luther King. If there is one speech that stands above all the others then it is this one, at the Freedom March in Washington in August 1963. Between 1955 and 1968 Martin Luther King was the inspiration of the American civil rights movement during a decade in which America made more progress towards racial equality than it had in the previous history of the republic.
Martin Luther King, Jr (1929–68) was born Michael Luther King, Jr, but later changed his name to Martin. He attended segregated schools in Georgia, before following his grandfather and father into the family trade as a pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. After theological college in Pennsylvania, King received a doctorate from Boston University in 1955, in which year he was recruited to serve as spokesman for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a campaign to force integration on the buses which had been started a year earlier by Rosa Parks. This led, in time, to a Supreme Court judgement that segregation on transport was unconstitutional. Taking up the presidency of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a position he held until his death, King became the most important of all the leaders of the civil rights movement.
Drawing inspiration from his faith and the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, Dr King resisted the calls to demand freedom by any means necessary. For that decision alone, Martin Luther King must be reckoned, in a time of tempest, as one of the greatest of politicians. To demand non-violent resistance and distinctly civil disobedience, seen to best effect in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, was a historic choice for which Dr King merits the laurels of posterity. The provocation, we have to remember, was severe.
In 1963, King led a coalition of civil rights groups through Birmingham, Alabama, probably the nation’s most segregated city. The television pictures of that night, which showed young black men being assaulted by dogs and policemen with water hoses, shamed the nation. Later the same year, King helped to convene the March for Jobs and Freedom, which drew over a quarter of a million people to the national mall, where he delivered this speech, the one that immortalised him. In 1964 Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, ending legal segregation in the United States and making discrimination illegal in hiring, public accommodation and transport. In 1965 Congress passed the Voting Rights Act which removed the remaining barriers to the franchise which, remarkably, had existed until then.
On 3 April 1968, King spoke at the Mason Temple Church in Memphis. He spoke about the struggle for equality and, humbly, about his own role in it: ‘We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t really matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountain top. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. But I’m not concerned about that now.’ The following day Dr Martin Luther King, Jr was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.
He remains the only non-president to have a national holiday dedicated in his honour, and the only non-president memorialised on the Great Mall in Washington DC, the scene of his greatest rhetorical triumph. The competition for that honour is fierce because King delivered many fine speeches in his career, of which the second-best was given to accept the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. On that occasion he delivered the words that we might hope, without great expectation, ring out in his homeland to this day: ‘I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.’
I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation. Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.
King places himself in the tradition of the American republic with his reference to Lincoln. His craft is evident in this opening, which summons Lincoln to his side and makes plain that the promise of America has yet to be redeemed. Note that the construction of the speech is classical. Proceeding in stately fashion through this exordium (introduction) to his narration (narrative) and passing through a refutation of dissenting voices before rising to a flourish in his peroration, King’s structure is exactly that set out by Cicero. With one major difference at the end, as we shall see.
There is, though, nothing histrionic about his words. The truth makes the words apocalyptic and strangely tranquil both at once. By the centennial of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, a host of derivative injustices held back the black person in America: high levels of unemployment, work at minimal wages, poor job mobility, systematic disenfranchisement and the persistence of racial segregation in the South. After invoking Lincoln, the Declaration of Independence, freedom for the thirteen original colonies, the Emancipation Proclamation, freedom for nearly 4 million black slaves – all of which has the air of ritual – King then changes the register to great effect.
When he moves on to say that a century later the negro still is not free, his diction is less formal, more direct. This is now the stark present, cut off from the abstract dignity of the past. The point established, King reaches for metaphor and his box of fireworks. ‘The flames of withering injustice’ evokes images of cross-burnings by the Ku Klux Klan, and he places the n
egro in manacles to make the point graphically that genuine freedom remains a dream, even as prosperity is widely enjoyed in white society. The pathos is established early. This is not going to be a forensic dissection of the civil rights programme. It is a call to arms against an injustice that offends the spirit of the nation.
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 colour are concerned. Instead of honouring 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. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And 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.
Two of the preliminary titles of this speech were ‘Normalcy, Never Again’ and ‘A Cancelled Check’, neither of which has the resonance of ‘I Have a Dream’. The original idea was that the rather bureaucratic metaphor of bankruptcy would carry the speech. It is demotic and recognisable to a mass audience, but also the opposite of poetic, and it grows even less poetic as King drags out the metaphor over five sentences. By the end of that it is starting to die: the image of the cancelled check is too thin to bear the weight of injustice it is being asked to carry.
This section is designed to set up the purpose of the speech, which is to help President Kennedy introduce a comprehensive civil rights bill. That bill was intended to do away with segregated public accommodation, protect the right to vote and the panoply of constitutional rights, desegregate all public schools and introduce a Federal Fair Employment Practices Act to debar discrimination in all employment. King’s scripted moderation is in deference to the anxieties of the president. When the civil rights activist James Bevel proposed a march from Birmingham, Alabama, to Washington, modelled on Gandhi’s famous Salt March to the Sea, President Kennedy was worried that bad publicity, maybe from violence on the day, could set back the cause. ‘The only effect is to create an atmosphere of intimidation,’ he said at the time, ‘and this may give some members of Congress an out.’ King therefore sets out to define the cause, to inspire the congregation but, at the same time, to soothe.
We have 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 quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children. It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning.
The locution ‘now is the time’ is always hard to justify. This, along with the entire vocabulary of the speeches of the Kennedy family, has become a staple cliché of British political rhetoric, especially on the left, where the effect is bathetic or ridiculous. King, of course, is neither bathetic nor ridiculous, because he has at least taken care to open with a memorable phrase – the fierce urgency of now. Then the tone shifts, gesturing to the grand style, but for the moment at the level of cliché. Each of these iterations says, essentially, the same thing. There is a sense that the speech is naming an injustice but not quite developing it. At this stage the response in the crowd is muted.
The rather derivative writing does, however, conceal a clever movement in time in the speech. All speeches can be analysed by their use of time. Some speeches settle scores with the past. Some describe a current predicament and some project perfection into the future. King has been conjuring up a sense of urgency by convincing his audience of the injustice to which the black man and woman is heir and which continues, shamefully, into the present. He does nothing with this for the moment, but it does raise high the platform on which he will stand in the famous passage at the end. The speech until this point has been flat, but high-octane rhetoric has to be justified. Like all drama, a speech needs valleys and peaks. You cannot jump from summit to summit. An audience will be carried along with a passage of rhetorical grandeur if it seems to derive from an argument and bring it to a resolution. Like a joke requiring the set-up, or the recitative between the arias, the duller sections matter in the construction and, even though they may not dwell in the mind, the speech would suffer for their absence. A brilliant speech is a whole entity and its more prosaic passages cannot be dismantled without doing violence to its finer parts.
And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquillity in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges. 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 marvellous 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. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back. 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. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.
This is a long and important passage of refutation. King takes three genuine anxieties seriously and deals with them in turn. The first accusation is the anxiety, from civil rights activists, that the march on Washington will be the end of the process rather than the start. King answers explicitly that there can be no rest until full rights of citizenship are extended. The second anxiety is that the civil rights movement wants too much and will keep returning for more. Here, King specifies police brutality, discrimination in motels and voting rights as the conditions of satisfaction. Finally, he answers the fear that violence is in the air by insisting that the protesters ‘must not be guilty of wrongful deeds’.
This is an important plea for forbearance, summarised in the striking contrast between ‘physical for
ce’ and ‘soul force’. Like the president, the organisers of the March on Washington had been anxious that the day should not descend into violence. Here King, who was greatly influenced by Gandhi’s concept of satyagraha, makes a dignified case for soulful resistance. It is worth noting what a remarkable feat of civic protest it was that 210,000 people should have gathered on the Mall in Washington, to protest against an historic injustice. There was, in the event, almost no reported violence. It is an achievement, in a speech designed to inspire through evoked injustice, to be able, at the same time, to make a successful appeal for calm. This is not the least of King’s gifts.
I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. And some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends. And 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, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners 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.
When They Go Low, We Go High Page 30
