Page 41 - DENG105_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_II

Elective English–II

Notes I have a dream that one day on 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 one day will live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin,
but the content of their character. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted,
every hill and mountain shall be made low. The rough places will be made plain and the
crooked places will be made straight. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With
this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountains of despair the stone of hope. With this
faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail
together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing we will be free one day.
The speech aired on national television, reaching millions of Americans, including the President,
who watched from the White House. It aided the Civil Rights Movement by providing a clear
articulation of the hopes and wishes behind actions that often seemed chaotic. Even on television,
King was a speaker with tremendous presence.
But the joy of the Birmingham and Washington victories was tempered by murders throughout
the South. In Mississippi on 12 May, Medgar Evers, a friend of King and an active NAACP
member, was shot dead at the door to his home. On 15 September at the Sixteenth Street
Baptist Church in Birmingham, from which King had led marches during the spring campaign,
four little black girls died when a bomb exploded. And on 22 November, John F. Kennedy was
assassinated in Dallas, Texas. These tragedies grounded all the movement’s victories in a
feeling of solemnity and necessity.
Nevertheless, more victories came. In January 1964, King appeared again on the cover of Time,
this time as the magazine’s “Man of the Year.” During the summer, King spoke in East and
West Germany, and met the Pope. He also campaigned for Johnson’s re-election, against
Johnson’s very conservative Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater. In July, Johnson invited
King to the White House when he signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which King
had helped to precipitate with the Birmingham campaign. The meeting reassured King about
Johnson’s priorities.

King’s SCLC activities that year took him to St. Augustine, Florida, early in the summer.
There, protestors attempting to integrate the town were suffering the violence of the Ku Klux
Klan. Four people had died in bombings, and the Klan was organizing mobs to attack civil
rights workers when they came to segregated sites. King, Abernathy, and others were arrested
for attempting to eat at a whites-only restaurant, but King left jail early to receive an honorary
degree from Yale University. His absence hurt the campaign in St. Augustine. An injunction
was soon passed banning marches, and the federal government refused to intervene. The city
thus became the site of another of SCLC’s unsuccessful actions.
Also fraught with violence and mixed results was that summer’s voter- registration campaign
in Mississippi, known as “Freedom Summer.” “Freedom Summer” involved cooperation between
SCLC, SNCC, CORE, and the NAACP, which together pushed to register as many blacks as
possible. The murder of three civil rights workers, under suspicious circumstances involving
local police, tainted the campaign. And when King initiated a march to protest the atmosphere
of hostility and violence, the police halted the event with tear gas and rifle butts.
King’s fame reached its apex in October of that year, when he was informed that he had won
the Nobel Peace Prize for 1964. On 10 December the Nobel Committee honoured him at a
ceremony in Oslo, Norway. King announced that he accepted the honour on behalf of the Civil
Rights Movement, to which he would give all $54,000 of the prize money. And by early 1965
the Nobel Prize Laureate was back in a jail cell in the southern United States.

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