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The 50th anniversary of the March on Washington---in which Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. made his famed "I Have a Dream" speech---has recently won renewed attention from various print and electronic media in the United States. But the more attention given to King's extraordinary speech, the less we seem to know about King himself,
the less aware we are about the serious challenges he was presenting, challenges that remain urgent and ignored to this very day.The March on Washington took place on 28 August 1963. Despite repeated fear mongering by certain commentators and public officials who predicted there would be violence in the streets---over 250,000 people descended upon Washington D.C. in a massive show of unity and peaceful determination.
I was there. About two-thirds of the demonstrators were African-American, and about one-third were white. After all these years I still recall how gripped I was by the vast sweep of the crowd moving like democracy's infantry across the nation's capital, determined to awaken "our leaders" in Congress and the White House.
The high moment of the day was Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. It was a call to freedom and enfranchisement for a people who had endured centuries of slavery followed by segregation and lynch-mob rule. In his speech King reminded us that "the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land."
He went on: "The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to distrust 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 their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom."
King continued to stoke the new militancy: "We can never 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. . . . Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice."
Comment: This fascinating visual animation of data clearly shows that the planet's population is becoming increasingly agitated by what the Powers That Be are doing to both people and planet.
As Laura Knight-Jadczyk has written: