The iconic ‘I Have a Dream’ speech urged us to fight against, not double down on, racial resentment.
T his week marks the anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington and the speech about civil rights that stirred a nation’s conscience. Martin Luther King Jr. was addressing a crowd of 260,000 when gospel singer Mahalia Jackson shouted, “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin.” King then departed from his prepared text to make an impassioned, extemporaneous appeal.
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 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!
Sadly, it seems, every year there is less recognition of King’s thrilling speech and its focus on the power of peaceful protest and on the need for unity against evil. The left seems to want to forget it, and many radicals claim that its evocation of a society that aspires to be colorblind is outdated and often used to “whitewash” King’s more radical calls for “economic justice.”
“It is apparent that the American public is comfortable claiming that Black lives don’t matter while attempting to commemorate a figure who died for civil rights, killed by a white supremacist,” says a 2023 statement by the Islamic Circle of North America’s Council for Social Justice. “Although legal segregation that existed before the 1960s is ‘over,’ systemic racism, systemic segregation, and oppression of Black Americans persists to this day.” Socialists are also quick to downplay King’s healing message and claim that the movement he led “was more than a class-based movement open to liberals and reformists of goodwill.”
Last week, New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani declined to answer a question about whether he is a communist. He responded evasively: “The elements of my platform are all about affordability, and I am a democratic socialist. . . . When New Yorkers ask me what it means, I take them to the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, who said, ‘Call it democracy or call it democratic socialism, there must be a better distribution of wealth for all of God’s children in this country.’”
King’s record on economics is mixed and open to interpretation. Eric Levine, a New York lawyer who has studied King, told me that King may have “believed that only when there is true equality among the races can African Americans achieve economic success like their fellow white countrymen.” He added, “That represents the American model of equal opportunity for all.” Levine concedes that King might have been sympathetic to a “model of guaranteed equal results apart from merit — the woke left’s definition of ‘equity,’” but he concludes that “regardless of which interpretation applies, King does not have a national holiday in his honor because he was a great economist.”
Indeed, those who wish to diminish King’s now nearly universal appeal as a champion of unity who moved the conscience of the country should first argue with Clarence Jones, who served as King’s speechwriter and personal attorney, and who wrote the major draft of the “I Have a Dream” speech.
In an interview last year, the 93-year-old Jones said that King’s call for a colorblind society “still remains a template.” Meanwhile, Frannie Block of the Free Press asked Jones about black thinkers such as Ibram X. Kendi, who argue that past discrimination can only be remedied by reverse discrimination and reparations today. Jones said that after reading Kendi’s work a reader could “come away believing that America is irredeemably racist, beyond redemption,” and he strongly rejects that view. “We have empirical evidence that we changed the country,” he says. But he fears that today’s social justice warriors have strayed from King’s message.
In 2021, Jones was a staunch opponent of an effort in California to force public school students to take courses on the marginalization of blacks and other minorities in American society. He wrote to Governor Gavin Newsom that the proposed curriculum was a “perversion of history” that left out “the intellectual and moral basis for radical nonviolence advocated by Dr. King” and his colleagues. “They were promoting black nationalism,” he said of the curriculum’s supporters. “They were promoting blackness over excellence.” Jones is proud of the fact that, thanks to his effort and that of others, the curriculum was scaled back. (What remains is still the subject of litigation.)
No one can be certain what Martin Luther King Jr. would say about all this. But his words in 1963 were unequivocal. As we mark the anniversary of his iconic speech, we should insist that it is up to those who would depart from his “template” to prove that the alternative — racial resentment and grievance — does more to bring us together.