Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 29, 1993 TAG: 9309220313
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: D3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID HINCKLEY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Martin Luther King, Jr. spent the night of Aug. 27 trimming his own speech to a simple theme: The Emancipation Proclamation was an unredeemed promissory note to black Americans that their country had for 100 years refused to cash.
Rereading the opening of King's speech today, its first beauty lies in its timelessness. Though we are further downfield today, the lines of resistance remain.
The speech crackles with an urgency that reminds us that King's nonviolence did not mean passivity. He warns ``there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights.'' He salutes ``the marvelous new militancy'' even as he welcomes ``our white brothers'' who ``have come to realize ... their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.''
It remains a chillingly powerful speech, a fact underscored by the way adversaries always tried to sidetrack the discussion.
King's phones were tapped to find whether he could be discredited because some friend was once a communist. Before the 1963 march, authorities warned the decent folks of Washington to stay indoors because these angry Negroes were likely to tear the town apart - a tactic as old as history, wherein an issue of justice is redefined as an issue of law and order, with the implication that justice matters less.
That tactic continues, as do other forms of diversion: when Jesse Jackson is discussed in terms of political ambition rather than his call for human dignity; when every bid for proportional representation or opportunity is dismissed as ``a quota''; when rap artists are noticed only for their occasional excess - not for their message that we've got to pay attention to urban America.
Twenty years after King's death, President Reagan responded to the proposal for a King holiday not by praising his spirit, but resurrecting the rotting corpse of the commie-hunting wiretaps.
This is the sound of a check not being cashed.
Perhaps it was because King instinctively understood this line of resistance - don't even give the issue a fair hearing - that he finished his 1963 speech with a reminder of the real stakes in any discussion of human freedom: the soul of America.
``I have a dream'' that one day all God's children will be free, he said. He rode the surge of the crowd to his thundering final cry: ``Let freedom ring!''
When he finished, he had spoken for 16 minutes and 10 seconds, during which time it's safe to say no one looked at a watch. Thirty years later, however, we might want to do that. Time is passing.
\ David Hinckley is a columnist for the New York Daily News.
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