On Aug. 28, 45 years from the day of Dr. King’s historic speech at the March on Washington, Barack Obama will receive the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party in Denver.
Barack Obama’s impending victory reflects not simply the triumph of hope, or the desire for change. It reveals an America that keeps growing, keeps renewing itself, keeps getting better.
Senator Obama has special gifts. He has run a remarkable campaign against the odds. But he has stood on the shoulders of giants. This has been a long campaign, but the journey to this day has been far longer.
King’s speech in 1963 was but one step in an ongoing movement. After the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education ruled that segregation was illegal, people remained skeptical that anything would change. But many started to move.
Then on Aug. 28, 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was murdered for the “crime” of whistling at the white wife of shopkeeper in Money, Miss. Till, raised in Chicago, was spending the summer with his uncle. His murderers gouged out his eyes, shot him in the head, used barbed wire to tie a cotton gin around his neck and threw him into the Tallahatchie River. Outraged, his mother brought his remains back to Chicago and demanded a funeral with an open
casket. It was reported that 50,000 people viewed the body. Jet Magazine sold record numbers of magazines. The protest of Mamie Till electrified African-Americans, even as the murderers were acquitted by a white jury in Mississippi.
Three months later, Rosa Parks refused to get up from that seat on the bus. When I asked her how she dared face the threats that would follow, she said she was thinking about Emmett Till. She had seen a picture of his body and was having trouble sleeping from the pain. She decided it was time to act. A young minister, Dr. Martin Luther King, came to her aid. The Montgomery Bus Boycott moved the civil rights movement to the nation’s attention.
On Aug. 28, 1963, when Dr. King delivered his dream, the South was still segregated. Neither the Civil Rights Bill nor the Voting Rights Bill had passed. The March on Washington took place at time of struggle, of beatings and arrests, of innocents sacrificed and heroes struck down. But Dr. King chose to look beyond the agony of the moment to envision a new day, the hope of what might be.
Now, 40 years later, Barack Obama’s victory is a testament not simply to his singular skills, but to the struggle and the sacrifice over many decades of many ordinary heroes, too often forgotten.
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