I never took the easy one, but as I get older, and as I knew I had the power and the strength, I took that rocky path, and I tried to smooth it out a little. I wanted to make it easier for you. I want you to have a chance at what I had. But I do not want you to have to run away to get it.
Women had been central to the civil rights movement -- Diane Nash, Ella Baker, Dorothy Height and many others -- but were only included in the program that day after one woman spoke up. The most prominent white speaker was called the 'white Martin Luther King'. Walter Reuther was the head of the United Automobile Workers, which provided office space, staff and funding for the march in Detroit and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. He was the seventh speaker listed on the program , and shared his remarks to the crowd.
Irving Bluestone, Reuther's former administrative assistant, shared this popular story to explain who Reuther was at the March on Washington: "Standing close to the podium were two elderly women. As Reuther was introduced, one of the women was overheard asking her friend, 'Who is Walter Reuther? He's the white Martin Luther King. An openly gay man organized the march in less than two months.
Bayard Rustin is "the most important leader of the civil rights movement you probably have never heard of," as LZ Granderson put it in a CNN column.
Not only did he organize the march in a matter of months, Rustin is credited with teaching King about nonviolence. He also helped raise funds for the Montgomery bus boycott and helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Council.
During the time, his sexual orientation was known, and he was often in the background to prevent it from being used against the movement. Rustin, who died in , was honored with a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in It wasn't the first planned 'March on Washington'.
Labor leader and civil rights advocate A. Philip Randolph had threatened a "March for Freedom" on the National Mall in to pressure then-President Franklin Roosevelt to provide equal opportunity for defense jobs. Randolph hired Rustin to organize part of the march, which they felt was the only way to prompt action after numerous appeals.
It worked: The march was called off after Roosevelt established the Fair Employment Practices Committee, abolishing racial discrimination in hiring. His life's work has been honored with a national holiday, schools and public buildings named after him, and a memorial on the National Mall in Washington. Take a look back at the late civil rights leader's defining years.
Here, King speaks in Washington in , the year he was assassinated. Hide Caption. Southern Christian Leadership Conference civil rights group often associated with Dr. The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit.
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Any interactives on this page can only be played while you are visiting our website. The person who wound up with the typewritten speech given by Dr. King is retired college basketball coach George Raveling. A college basketball player at Villanova, organizers saw Raveling in the crowd and asked him to be a bodyguard on stage.
He stood next to Dr. King on stage, and decided to ask him for the paper copy of the speech. King obliged and Raveling has the speech locked away in a safe place, with no intention of selling it. Toggle navigation. Here are 10 facts about the march and the events that led to the speech. 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 a colored person in Mississippi cannot vote and a colored person 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. I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of your trials and tribulations. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by storms of persecutions 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 modern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. I say to you, my friends, we have the difficulties of today and tomorrow.
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 out in the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners 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 oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
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 their character.
I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; that one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.
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