1. Martin Luther King’s prepared speech did not include any of the famous “dream” sequence.
2. White officials and the news media anticipated race riots or worse.
3. The freedom movement itself diverted female leaders into a secondary march along Independence Avenue.
4. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover secretly decreed that King’s “demagogic speech yesterday” made him the nation’s “most dangerous Negro.”
5. Hostile reactions spawned a pervasive “government is bad” vocabulary in national politics.
6. The movement for civil rights opened gates to many collateral freedoms, keeping racial change “the central drama of democratic progress.”
7. President Barack Obama hesitates at a “tip-toe stance,” even though silence about race “collapses American history into a fairy tale.”
8. Racial and ethnic division remains a prime but unaddressed cause of partisan gridlock.
 For more on these themes, see my current essay “Remembering the March”.
