The story of Martin Luther King's struggle for civil rights in America

Towards the end of his speech, King abandoned his notes and gazed out over the sea of faces gathered before the Lincoln Memorial. Reacting to encouragement from the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson (“Tell them about the dream, Martin!”), King embarked on the now-legendary unscripted passage with its hope-saturated refrain – “I have a dream...”.

Here, on the baking Wednesday afternoon of 28 August 1963, those closing seconds of King’s speech would become a defining moment for the Civil Rights Movement, one almost as significant as Lincoln putting his pen to the Emancipation Proclamation 100 years earlier. As much as Lincoln advanced the cause of black Americans with one quick action, so too did King with a confident, unambiguous speech that spoke right to the heart of middle America, of black and of white. And his words bore quick fruit. Within a year, and after a recent history of race relations pockmarked by brutal violence and murder, the Civil Rights Act was passed by Congress.

Son of a preacher man

The events of that high-summer afternoon confirmed King as the figurehead of the Civil Rights Movement. A glance at the shape of his early life might have suggested this rise to have been inevitable. His preacher father – Martin Luther King Sr – had shown great opposition to the segregationist laws under which black Americans, particularly those in the family’s native South, were forced to live. An incident where King Sr refused to acknowledge a traffic officer who had referred to him as “Boy” was but one episode that would crystallise the younger King’s calling.

Allied to this sense of gross injustice was a notable precociousness. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1929, King was not only gifted academically – he entered college two years early and graduated at the tender age of 19 but he also possessed remarkable public speaking skills, winning several debating contests.

And then there was his unstinting faith. In 1954, aged just 25, he became pastor of a Baptist church in Montgomery, Alabama. His religious conviction was his backbone. Indeed, he himself believed that this faith both outscored and underpinned his grasp of social justice.

“Before I was a civil rights leader,” he would later declare, “I was a preacher of the Gospel. This was my first calling and it still remains my greatest commitment.” For a man who was the symbol of such a crashing tidal wave of societal change, this is some admission.

King first became active in social protest in the early 1950s. He was particularly fired by the nonviolent teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and, in the mid-1950s shifted towards pacifism, having previously supported the use of guns for self-defence. King’s first great campaign was the Montgomery Bus Boycott. This followed Rosa Parks’ refusal, in late 1955, to give up her seat to a white passenger. King was the boycott’s chief architect so, when the year-long campaign brought about a judicial ruling that outlawed segregation on the city’s public transport, he became nationally recognised as one of the Civil Rights Movement’s most high-profile leaders.

Christian coalition

In 1957, King and several other activists formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a loose coalition of black churches united to lobby and campaign for wholesale improvements in the realm of civil rights. As its leader, King was the most recognisable spokesman for the movement. While his profile irrefutably aided the cause, giving the more liberal quarters of the country a figurehead with whom to identify, it also made King vulnerable.

Not only was he a target for individuals (he was once stabbed at a book signing), he was also in the sights of the FBI who, in the early 1960s, kept a beady eye on him, whether by fair means or foul.

The campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, which started four months before the March On Washington, was a major flashpoint. While at pains to ensure that anti-segregation protests in the city remained non-violent, King did call for the occupation of public areas. is prompted a heavy-handed reaction from Birmingham’s particularly unsavoury Chief of Police, Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor. The Chief instructed his forces to set both water cannon and dogs on the protesters, many of whom were children.

Arrested and jailed, King wrote his famous ‘Letter From Birmingham Jail’ while incarcerated, in which he presented a sturdy defence of civil disobedience and an undeniable demolition of the illogical nature of certain laws. “We can never forget,” he wrote, “that everything Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’.”

Planning for the March On Washington began in late 1962 but, thanks to the subsequent brutal events of Birmingham – and many other cities across the Southern states – the mass protest in the capital the following August wasn’t before time. Born out of frustration with the inertia of the White House when it came to change for black Americans (King described John F Kennedy’s commitment to civil rights as “tokenism”), the march was viewed suspiciously by both the Oval Office and certain elements of white society. At one of the planning meetings the month before, Kennedy had talked of the “atmosphere of intimidation” that such a mass gathering would create.

Similarly, on the eve of the march, King was interviewed on NBC by an interviewer who suggested that it would be “impossible to bring 100,000 militant Negroes into Washington without incident and possibly riots”.

Fearing the worst

It would seem the authorities shared the view that violence was inevitable. Local hospitals cancelled non-urgent operations and stocked up on blood supplies. Jails transferred prisoners to out-of-town facilities to free up cells. And 2,000 National Guardsmen, along with 3,000 additional soldiers, were drafted in to deal with the feared bloodbath.

But the bloodbath never came. In fact, there were just three arrests all day – and the detainees were all white. This was an extraordinary statistic for an extraordinary day, one where the number of attendees vastly overwhelmed expectations. They came from near and far, travelling night and day, by bus, train, car and plane. From New York City alone, came 450 specially chartered buses.

And they came in peace. They weren’t the militants the media had filled their headlines with. They were non-violent black Americans voicing their concerns about social and economic conditions, and a significant proportion – possibly up to 25 per cent – were white Americans.

They were united in their search and support for a more equal, more just United States. On this summer afternoon, Washington’s sizzling sidewalks filled with song, more often than not the Civil Rights Movement’s unofficial anthem We Shall Overcome. They marched in solidarity, their placards demanding change.

They called for “Decent Housing Now!” or declared “We March For Integrated Schools Others pleaded for employment laws that “Abolish hate at the hiring gate”.

There was music up on the speakers’ platform too – whether gospel singers like Mahalia Jackson or young folk acts like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez or Peter, Paul and Mary. Alongside the speech-makers from the ‘Big Six’ civil rights groups who’d organised the event, there was also the odd unexpected contribution.

The actor Burt Lancaster, for instance, praised the crowd for “Helping us to redefine, in the middle of this dangerous century, what is meant by the American Revolution”. As they listened, marchers cooled off by bathing their feet in the Reflecting Pool, the 618-metre-long water feature situated between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument obelisk.

Some 80,000 of these marchers would have refuelled themselves with the 50-cent packed lunches that had been provided. Not everyone was in a favourable frame of mind, though. On the programme of speakers, women were very much underrepresented, while more militant voices were denied a platform for being too outspoken.

The most forthright voice of dissent belonged to Malcolm X. He was the spokesman for the separatism-favouring Nation Of Islam, and he denounced the day’s events as the “Farce On Washington”. From a distance, he disapproved of what he saw as the co-option of the protest by both JFK’s administration and white liberals.

“It’s just like when you have some coffee that’s too black,” he complained, “which means it’s too strong. What do you do? You integrate it with cream. You make it weak. But if you pour too much cream in, you won’t even know you ever had coffee.”

Malcolm X also railed against the controlled nature of the event. “They told those Negroes when to hit town, how to come, where to stop, what sign to carry, what song to sing… And then told them to get out of town before sundown.” He had a point; the marchers had been asked to vacate the capital by nightfall.

Monumental day

To whatever extent the federal government had imposed itself on the original vision for the day, the impact was felt strongly by middle America, thanks to round-the-hour live coverage provided by CBS and regular updates from other channels, such as NBC. Indeed, an NBC news special named the March as nothing short of “One of the most historic days in the nation’s history”. The power of non-violent protest – at least in symbolic terms – couldn’t be denied, while King’s fluent, fluid rhetoric put the legislators on the back foot.

As King delivered his final “I have a dream…” refrain, Abraham Lincoln – or his marble likeness, at least – appeared to bestow approval on the pastor’s words. Both applied principle to a fundamental fissure in a society founded on democracy and equality. Both forever changed the direction and shape of American society. And, most poignantly of all, both would ultimately succumb to the assassin’s bullet.

Nige Tassell is a journalist whose work has appeared in the The Word, Q, The Guardian, The Sunday Times and New Statesman

This article was first published in the March 2016 issue of BBC History Revealed