Then we gathered around the Reflecting Pool for the program. In the photos of the crowd taken from the stage, I’m on the left, about halfway up. Although I'm a little hard to make out.

The sound wasn’t all that great as I recall, and the speeches were sometimes hard to hear. And they were, after all, speeches. We had walked a ways, and it was hot—-really hot, sitting still in the sun. I was more interested in the music: Dylan, Baez, Odetta, Lena Horne, Peter, Paul & Mary. Marian Anderson had sung earlier. I wound up wandering around a bit, looking at the signs, looking at people.

There was a young firebrand named John Lewis who spoke, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Famed labor leader Walter Reuther spoke: labor unions were an organizing force for the March, which was billed (as my button says) as a march for JOBS and Freedom. It was about the economy then, too—economic justice, equal opportunity.

Mahalia Jackson sang, and then Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke. Even dulled by the heat, I remember hearing those words, feeling that crowd. King’s speech was about the fierce urgency of now.

“Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God’s children. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.”
King told the country that these rights could no longer be denied, and that efforts to secure these rights was only beginning. He said that half measures won’t be enough.

“We can never be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro 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.”

Then he spoke to those who had suffered for their protests, to give them hope.

“Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama...go back to the slums and ghettos of our Northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. At the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream."

That’s how the most famous passages of that speech begins. And even if it now survives mostly as a mini-soundbite (“I have a dream”), it’s worth recalling their purpose as well as their resonance.