The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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| The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
August 28, 2003 Artful look at MLK's 'Dream' By JIM AUCHMUTEY "Peter Jennings Reporting --- I Have a Dream" Grade: A The climax of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech has become such a great American sound bite that it's easy to miss the uncertainties behind the moment. Forty years later, we see a brilliant orator in black and white as he almost sings the lines that will be adapted all too soon for his tomb: "Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we're free at last!" What we don't see is the young man who had feared that his movement was dissipating, who nervously edited and rewrote his text the night before in the knowledge that he would never again have such a pulpit. The back story is the focus of "Peter Jennings Reporting --- I Have a Dream," an hour-long documentary about what the anchor calls "one of the most important speeches in American history." Airing tonight, on the 40th anniversary of the March on Washington, it is an artful and insightful exercise in context. (And, for that matter, restraint --- despite the title, Jennings stays mostly in the background.) The program reminds us that nothing is inevitable, even the success of something enshrined in the national memory as an overdue moral crusade. The background begins in the spring of 1963 when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was staging protests in Birmingham in the hopes of dramatizing the need for a civil rights bill. To draw attention to the cause, a desperate King volunteered to go to jail. "Either he was going to step up to the plate in Birmingham or he was going to drop by the wayside as a leader," says former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, a King lieutenant who was one of numerous players and historians interviewed for the report. But the jailing did little to rouse the nation, which perceived civil rights as a Southern problem. Enter the villains. Within a few weeks' time, Bull Connor's firehoses blasted child protesters in Birmingham, and Gov. George Wallace defied the federal government by trying to bar black students from the University of Alabama. The first spectacle horrified America. The second riled President John F. Kennedy, who went on network TV that night to announce that he was sending a civil rights bill to Congress. Thanks to its opponents, the movement was moving again. The time was right for the mass march on Washington that black leaders had long dreamed of. Government officials were nervous as more than a quarter of a million people descended on the capital. Troops were put on alert. Liquor stores were ordered closed. A Kennedy administration representative sat behind the podium at the Lincoln Memorial with a button that would allow him to snuff the mike in case one of the speakers said something deemed too incendiary. At the end of a hot day, the 34-year-old minister from Atlanta got his turn. "There we were, the whole world watching us, and all of us speaking together out of one man's mouth," says actor Ossie Davis. The speech was of two parts. King read most of the first portion; some thought him unanimated --- "not preacher enough," Jennings says. Two-thirds of the way through, however, King paused and seemed to stumble for a moment, and then veered off-text into the sequence everyone remembers. "I think he said, 'I'm going to preach,' " says Georgia Congressman John Lewis, who had addressed the throng. King had played the "dream" riff many times before. In one of the documentary 's most fascinating clips, we hear him speaking earlier that summer in Detroit, using almost exactly the same phrases he would make famous in Washington. When the 1,550-word speech was finished, Kennedy, who had never seen King speak and was watching on TV at the White House, turned to an aide and said, "He 's damn good." And then an interesting thing happens in the documentary. The vintage film clips go from black and white to color, as if, like Oz in reverse, we've left the grainy memory of an alien land and entered something closer to the reality we inhabit today. It's a profound point subtly communicated: On a long-ago afternoon, one man's message, inspiringly delivered, helped America re-imagine itself in full living color. GRAPHIC: Photo: The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (above in 1963) veered from his prepared text in his "I Have a Dream" speech. / ABC; Photo: Anchor Peter Jennings examines the March on Washington of 1963. / TERRY ASHE / ABC LOAD-DATE: August 28, 2003 Download 10.49 Kb. Share with your friends:
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