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The Most Famous American Sermon of the 20th Century
A Sermon Given
by Rev. Roger Fritts
on January 13, 2002
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
Sociologists have suggested that besides the various religious
denominations that make up America: the Catholics, the Baptists, the
Methodists, the Jews, the Muslims, the Buddhists, the Hindus, the
Sikhs, and the Unitarian Universalists, an American civil religion exists
that unites most of us and allows most of us to sing together "God
Bless America." Sociologist Dr. Robert Bellah wrote:
I conceive of the central tradition of American civil
religion not as a form of national self-worship, but as
the subordination of the nation to ethical principles
that transcend it and in terms of which it should be
judged. I am convinced that every nation and every
people come to some form of religious self-understanding . . . American civil religion is not the
worship of the American nation but an understanding
of the American experience in the light of ultimate and
universal reality . . .
All religions have scriptures. American civil religion has four
documents which define it. The first two are the Declaration of
Independence and the Constitution. The Declaration of Independence
is so important as a sacred scripture of our civil religion that we honor
it with a national holiday each year in July. Many of us instantly
recognize the key words of the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men
are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among
these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness...
And we recognize the constitution:
We the People of the United States, in order to form
a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure
domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense,
promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings
of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain
and establish this Constitution for the United States of
America.
The Civil War was the second great event that formed our national
self understanding. That war raised the deep questions of national
meaning. After the war, a renewed theme of equality and democracy
entered American civil religion. Nowhere is this theme stated more
vividly than in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. This short speech
became the third sacred document of American Civil religion, after
the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Another
holiday, Memorial Day, was first established to honor those who died
in the Civil War, and the Gettysburg Address is often read at
ceremonies on that day. Many of us instantly recognize the words of
the address:
. . . that government of the people, by the people, for
the people, shall not perish from the earth.
One hundred years passed before a fourth sacred document defined
our civil religion. It was also created at a time when the people of the
nation were struggling with the deepest questions of national meaning.
At first not everyone recognized its importance. The day after the
1963 march on Washington, the Washington Post did not mention
Martin Luther King's speech. Still, over time the words of Dr. King
spoke at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 became the fourth sacred
scripture of American civil religion. The speech is a symbol of the
effort to strengthen and broaden Jefferson and Lincoln's words about
the rights and dignity of citizens of this country. Today every
American school child and every adult is familiar with four words in
that famous sermon, "I have a dream . . ." The words and images of
Dr. King have appeared in thousands of places including a postage
stamp and in a television advertisement for a communication
company.
This coming Tuesday, January 15, is the seventy-third birthday of
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This morning I want to look back at the
sermon that Dr. King gave on a Wednesday afternoon at the end of
August 1963.
Martin Luther King Jr. proposed the 1963 March on Washington as
a way to put pressure on Congress and the President to pass a civil
rights bill. The idea came originally from A. Philip Randolph who had
first proposed a march on Washington twenty years before. Bayard
Rustin, a gay civil rights leader, a pacifist, a conscientious objector,
was placed in charge of planning the details of the march. This was in
spite of the strong objections of the conservative civil rights leader,
Roy Wilkins, the head of the NAACP.
With Rustin doing the organization work, Dr. King arrived in
Washington the night before the march. That night King sat in his
suite in the Willard Hotel and began to write his sermon for the next
day. Rustin restricted each speaker to seven or eight minutes. King
said to one advisor, "I don't want Roy Wilkins saying I overstepped
my bounds . . . that I had to show off." So he worked to keep his talk
short.
The opening sentence was a reference to Lincoln and the document
that had freed the slaves in 1863. The first words were modeled in the
Gettysburg Address. "Five score years ago," King wrote, "a great
American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand signed the
Emancipation Proclamation. . . "
Looking for a metaphor, King chose the image of black people
coming to Washington as though it were a bank and they had come to
cash a check. He wrote:
In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to
cash a check. When the architects of our republic
wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and
the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a
promissory note to which every American was to fall
heir. This note was a promise that all men would be
guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness.
It was a slow start. This image of a promissory note or a check as a
symbol did not capture people's imagination. Next King wrote one of
his standard refrains. Next, he used a common preaching style called
parallel construction. King uses the same phrase "Now is the time" to
open three sentences, and each sentence has a similar structure.
- Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of
segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.
- 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
quicksand of
racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.
King wrote the next part of his speech to those who said that the Civil
Rights movement was a passing fad that would soon fall out of
fashion.
It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the
urgency of the moment and to underestimate the
determination of the Negro. . . . Nineteen sixty-three
is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that
the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be
content will have a rude awakening . . .
King worked late into the night to find just the right words for his
seven minutes. He wrote the next passage to Malcolm X and other
blacks who were critical of his nonviolent approach:
The marvelous new militancy, which has engulfed the
Negro community, must not lead us to distrust of all
White people, for many of our White brothers, as
evidenced by their presence here today, have come to
realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny and
their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.
King follows this with another parallel construction using variations
on a cumbersome refrain, "We can never be satisfied as long as . . ."
- We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with
the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the
highways and the hotels of the cities.
- We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility
is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one.
- 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.
With this King's seven or eight minutes were nearly over. In the early
morning hours of August 28, he added a conclusion and gave his
handwritten draft to an aid for typing and reproduction. The text of
the sermon was politically sound, but far from historic.
Twenty-one charter trains pulled in that morning, and buses poured
south through the Baltimore tunnel at the rate of one hundred per
hour. From Hollywood came James Garner, Marlon Brando, Harry Belafonte, and even Charlton
Heston. At 10:00 a.m. Joan Baez, Peter
Paul and Mary, and Bob Dylan sang. Socialist Norman Thomas
looked over the crowd and said, "I'm glad I lived long enough to see
this day."
According to the morning television news only about 25,000 people
had turned out for the march. Nevertheless, by noon police estimated
the crowd at more than 200,000. Final estimates ranged from 300,000
to 500,000 people.
The planning committee barred Coretta King and the other wives of
the male leaders from marching with their husbands, and the
committee scheduled no female speakers during the entire three hour
program. However, the planners did invite women to sing. Josephine
Baker, Marian Anderson, and finally Mahalia Jackson. A cappella
Jackson sang a spiritual born of the slave experience as people in the
crowd cried. After two and a half hours of speeches and songs A.
Philip Randolph introduced Martin Luther King.
CBS had provided live continuous coverage all afternoon. By the time
King stood to speak, ABC and NBC had cut away from the afternoon
soap operas to broadcast the march. King recited his text verbatim
until near the end of his allotted time.
No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be
satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and
righteousness like a mighty stream.
The crowd responded. King departed from his text, speaking
extemporaneously and taking words from other sermons he had given.
According to James Bevel in 1962, he and Dr. King visited the
charred remains of the Mount Olive Baptist Church in Terrell County,
Georgia, which the Klan had burned to the ground. In the service a
young woman, a college student named Prathia Hall, today the
Reverend Prathia Hall Wynn, led prayers. As she prayed Ms. Hall
began to intone her own vision of the future with the phrase, "I have
a dream." As ministers often do, King incorporated this effective
phrase into his own speaking. By late1962 the phrase, "I have a
dream" had become a fixture in a sermon he frequently gave as he
traveled the United States.
The word "I" in the phrase "I have a dream" is critical to the
emotional power of the sentence. Family system theory teaches that
a healthy leader is a leader who can say "I" when others are
demanding "you" or "we." King did not say "You are to blame" or
"We must do this." Instead he made an "I-statement." A healthy
leader has the capacity to say I, to define his or her own life goals and
values apart from the surrounding pressures. A healthy leader has the
capacity to take responsibility for his or her own destiny and
emotional well being in the midst of an anxious society.
This is what Martin Luther King did. The President had tried to
discourage the march. The Attorney General had told him that some
of his closest advisers were communists, and ordered King to cut off
contact with them. The FBI was taping his phones and the phones of
his supporters. The Black Muslims were calling the march a farce. A
gunman had just killed James Meredith, and others were making
threats on Dr. King's life. The Ku Klux Klan was burning churches.
In the midst of these pressures, he could say "I" and define his own
vision of the future, just as his name sake, Martin Luther, had said,
"Here I stand, I can do no other" during the reformation.
On that day in August Dr. King was not completely alone in his
decision to digress from his written remarks. Behind King, on August
28 was the singer Mahalia Jackson. She had heard King use the "I
have a dream" phrase in other sermons, and she knew its power to
excite congregations. She shouted, "Tell 'em about the dream,
Martin."
The remaining sermon was a tape of the conclusion of Dr. King's
speech, which he gave without notes. The writings, documents, and
recordings of Martin Luther King, Jr. are protected by copyright by
the Estate of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Atlanta, Georgia. None
of the documents may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotation embodied in critical articles and reviews. You can find the
complete text of the sermon on the web at:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/speeches/pub/address_at_march_on_washington.pdf
Office@CedarLane.org
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