The occasion of his “I Have a Dream” speech, the 1963 March on Washington, came in the wake of a long season of anti-Black violence. In May of that year protests against racial segregation in Birmingham, Ala., which came to be known as the Children’s Crusade, had been met with fire hoses, police dogs and batons. That same month saw an angry mob assault the sit-in that took place at a Woolworth’s in Jackson, Miss. In June, the civil rights activist Medgar Evers was murdered outside his home, also in Jackson.
When Dr. King imagined in his speech that someday “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will sit down together at the table of brotherhood,” that dream served as an alternative to the bloody and dispiriting reality of the present.
Dr. King didn’t run from this evil or deny its reality, but he also did not let despondency have the final word. “I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history,” he said during his 1964 acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize. “I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsam and jetsam in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.”
He looked at the stark reality of his present and dared to defy it.
-Dr. King was buoyed by a vision of peace between God and humanity outlined by the Hebrew prophets in the Bible. The hope he turned to was first forged in the Black church tradition of his youth. That tradition often had to rely upon divine assistance because it did not have political or economic power.
In that same Nobel Prize speech he said, “I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive good will proclaim the rule of the land.”
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