I HAVE A DREAM

Forty years ago this week an amazing event occurred around the Reflecting Pool at the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

A black evangelist, Martin Luther King Jr., told America and the world

“I have a dream”.

There were 250,000 people there that day on August 28, 1963 as King told of his dream for people to be treated as equals in a country where people of his colour had been treated and sold as slaves.

It was a time when, in many American states in the 1960s, blacks could not vote. They could not use the same public water fountains as white people. Could not use the same public bathrooms or even stay in the same hotels. And they had to ride at the back of the bus. Land of the free? Home of the brave? Blacks had to be pretty brave protesting in the South. And some white supporters were being shot. This was twenty years after World War Two.

On August 28, 1963, a veritable sea of people, black and white, were enthralled by the sob and the passion of a black parson’s voice as the son of another black preacher man talked about going to the mountain top.

Less than five years later Martin Luther King Jr made a speech about having” been to the mountain top” and next day he was assassinated on a balcony in a motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

In April 1968 I sat in the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, as a soaring chorus of glorious black singers sent Martin Luther King Jr back to his maker. The small red brick chapel was actually his father’s church.

If there was a quarter of a million people in Washington in 1963 there was at least a similar number jamming the streets of Atlanta, Georgia, for King’s funeral procession five years later.

The kaleidoscopic memories. His white-haired, beaten but stoic, father reading the lesson. His unbreakable wife, Coretta Scott King. His kids in church.

Sitting a few rows from me was a presidential candidate, Robert Kennedy. He would die from Sirhan Sirhan’s bullets in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles two months later.

Next to Bobby was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. She was wearing the same black veil, the Spanish mantilla, she had worn to the funeral of her own husband in November 1963 – less than two months after King had shared his dream in Washington.

In the pew in front of the Kennedys was the Republicans’ candidate for 1968, Richard Milhous Nixon. I remember that he was wearing TV makeup in a church. He would go on to win that presidential election but within six years he would be disgraced and driven from office by Watergate.

After the church service—and with soaring black choir voices figuratively lifting the roof -- the official mourners shuffled into the sunshine and started the long walk to the burial plot.

King’s roughly hewn wooden coffin was symbolically being carried on a carriage drawn by mules.

By a fluke I was shoved in the back by a Secret Service man. Propelled into a single conga line of mourners and became wedged between Bobby Kennedy and his wife Ethel.

In the April sun thousands of hurting black Americans saw Bobby Kennedy as the last white hope. They remembered that, as his brother John’s Attorney General in Washington, he had sent federal troops and FBI agents to force the integration of white universities in the South.

Their chant of “Bobby, Bobby, Bobby” grew with a combination of grief, frustration, gut-wrenching emotion and intensity.

It was an engraved moment in my life. Kennedy, smaller in real life and with stooped shoulders, seemed to slump even more.

It flashed on me that this man knew the size and weight of his mantle with John Kennedy and Martin Luther King now dead.

He could not, we could not, know that less than two month’s later his own brains would be splattered over a kitchen floor in Los Angeles.

With terrorist destruction and the mass deaths at the World Trade centres and Bali and Jakarta and this month in Baghdad and Jerusalem and in India maybe individual assassinations start to fade in the public mind.

But the deaths of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy in less than sixty months seared into my impressionable brain.

To me it was almost the death of hope. To me these were decent people trying to do something. Wrapped in fables and full of foibles but with passionate, democratic dreams we could encompass and share.

And they all died violently.

Looking back – with a head full of Martin Luther King memories – it was a terribly violent time. Not quite September Eleven but bad nonetheless.

John Kennedy murdered. King. Bobby. The Watts riots. Newark. Detroit. And the shooting of the segregationist presidential candidate George Wallace.

At a hospital in Laurel, Maryland, I watched Wallace’s wife walk out with gore on her yellow dress and thought of a Jackie Kennedy pink dress stained with her husband’s blood a few violent years earlier.

As the new crucible of democracy the United States has had a pretty rough time.

Forty years ago this week Martin Luther King Jr said “ I have been to the mountain top”.

Sadly, since then, so many people have jumped or fallen off.

.©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2003