Taylor Branch

So immigration blessed us with Cherry in spite of the old immigration policy, long before I knew anything about the 50-year-old Reform Act we celebrate today. Many Americans still know very little about that historic law. You may be familiar with the origins from your application process, but I have been asked to review for you its central place in our Constitutional history.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 grew directly from momentum built by the modern civil rights movement, in the era of Dr. Martin Luther King. Having been enthralled to study and write about that history for nearly 40 years, I can assure you the 1965 law was difficult to pass. Some called it a miracle. Anti-civil-rights forces filibustered to preserve restrictions that had choked down immigration from all but a few countries in northern Europe, excluding most of the world. Senator Edward Kennedy said political success was unimaginable until 1964, when civil rights cracked open the gate. Even so, President Lyndon Johnson had to cajol, wheedle, and cuss. “Where’s my blankety-blank immigration bill?” he yelled day and night. As full-fledged citizens, you may be entitled now to hear his actual profane words, but not from me here in this dignified space.

President Johnson’s allies pushed immigration reform through Congress only a month after the Voting Rights Act of 1965, breaking Senate filibusters against the two bills by almost identical landslide votes. Then on October 3rd, fifty years ago Saturday, President Johnson stood beneath the Statue of Liberty in New York to correct what he called “a cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American Nation…the harsh injustice of the national origins quota system.” With his signature, the 1965 Act abolished that pretension to an ethnic empire. “We can now believe,” he declared, “that it will never again shadow the gate to the American Nation with the twin barriers of prejudice and privilege.”

These are ringing words of freedom. They affirm that the United States is founded not on any language or ethnic identity, but on the pioneer ideal of equal citizenship embodied in the Constitution’s first three words: “We the People.” A few historians like me have proclaimed the 1965 Act a third pillar of democratic fulfillment from the civil rights era, along with Voting Rights and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. You are a testament to that ideal. No other nation holds naturalization ceremonies quite like this one.

And yet, the law that brings you here lacks public appreciation for its impact and promise. There is no Martin Luther King of immigration reform—nor any landmark anniversary on par with Selma and the March on Washington. Our immigration stance, which embraces applicants worldwide, earns nothing like the stature it deserves here in the United States. Critics still ignore or belittle the 1965 law, branding it merely a Cold War measure to admit more refugees from Communism.

There remains an underside to American performance for immigrants, legal and otherwise. Even on this happy day—perhaps especially on this happy day—we should pause briefly to fortify hope by acknowledging reality. I would be shocked if most of you do not suffer moments of isolation, doubt, and rejection, not only from Americans by birth but from members of other immigrant groups. The United States has not reached its perfect Union. We must seek to understand flaws from the past in order to overcome them for the future.

The very first naturalization law, which established in 1790 the oath and other features of today’s ceremony, required an aspiring immigrant to be “a free white person.” For more than a century, as our upstart nation grew slowly into a world power, nativists labored to place the “white person” standard within some scientific hierarchy of races, always with white people on top. This ruling conceit culminated in signal embarrassments for three consecutive years.

In 1922, the Supreme Court unanimously refused the citizenship application of one Takao Ozawa, a Japanese immigrant of 28 years’ legal residency, on the ground that his light skin did not meet an objective test of membership in “the Caucasian race.” Promptly in 1923, however, the Court confronted an applicant whose experts testified that Punjabi descent made him Caucasian along with certain Polynesians, Hamites, and others. In United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind [261 U.S. 204 (1923)], our Supreme Court abruptly reversed course, again unanimously, once science failed to support popular prejudice. Spurning what they called the previous year’s “speculations of the ethnologist,” the Justices denied naturalization to Thind by formulating a new legal standard of whiteness to be based on public opinion, “interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man.”

In 1924, Congress debated the Court’s floundering definitions. Theories clashed over basic racial categories, let alone details, with eminent social scientists counting variously three, five, eleven, sixteen, on up to sixty-three distinct races. Worse, the whole “Caucasian” category turned out to rest then and now on one antique shipped in 1795 to Johann von Blumenbach, a founder of sociology, who said the skull arrived from the Caucasus resembled many German specimens in his collection. Congress, attempting to circumvent an exposed charade, substituted nationality for the vagaries of race in laws governing immigration and naturalization. The National Origins Act of 1924 favored allegedly “sturdy stocks” of northern Europe. It reserved seventy percent of annual immigration quotas to England, Germany, and Ireland. Most observers at the time endorsed a notion of Nordic or Teutonic citizenship in the new law, which the Chicago Tribune called “a Declaration of Independence, not less significant and epoch-making for America and the world than the Declaration of 1776.”

This was the national origins quota system we abolished half a century ago with President Johnson’s Immigration and Nationality Act, whose anniversary we celebrate today. Over the past fifty years, our openness to applicants from all nations has transformed the face of the United States literally and figuratively. Today you join 48 million naturalized legal immigrants since then, of whom some 34 million survive. They supply not only half our population growth but also a comparable portion of new skilled employment. More than we realize, Americans are at home with our national creed of multi-national, multi-ethnic citizenship. All of us must help stragglers reach out, too, perceiving that no foreign origin is too foreign to yield a fellow citizen. The stakes are far greater than courtesy or manners. At the Statue of Liberty, President Johnson proclaimed a vital imperative for our shrinking globe. “We, because of who we are,” he said, “feel safer and stronger in a world as varied as the people who make it up.”

From this day forward, I urge you to proceed as though you own an equal share of our nation’s faults as well as her glories, because you do. Our votes count the same. We are pledged to make real that equal responsibility from the founders, and your experience is vital. Be pushy if need be. Help us lay claim to the converging path of justice that you have marched in good faith, drawing strength from inclusion—rising from discrimination toward full respect and opportunity alongside still-disfavored groups such as women, the disabled, persons of color, and gay and lesbian communities, among others.

Help us restore the determined public trust at the heart of our American experiment. Summon us to dispel cynicism and gridlock in public discourse, inspired anew by the example of our first African American president to tackle the most difficult national problems. Remind us all—not just on occasions like this—of the cumulative audacity and optimism packed into the breathtaking Preamble sentence you now inherit: “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.”

American citizenship is a tough job. Here’s hoping no one told you it’s easy. Welcome again. I am honored to join you. God bless.

After today’s ceremony with newly naturalized US citizen Gina Haller (center, with official certificate).

A new citizen comes forward for her US citizenship certificate during today’s ceremony.

The path of adaptation strains upward but rushes ahead. Only a year ago, Simon & Schuster published my compact narrative history, The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement. Based on classroom discussions from Alabama to Idaho, I gave the book an unusual author’s dedication, “For students of freedom and teachers of history.“

Civic education has suffered in part because school standards now emphasize math and reading above history. This is a special hazard in a country founded as a bold experiment to secure freedom in the capacity of citizens for self-government.

Many teachers, under siege, had urged me to preserve the storytelling engagement of my civil rights histories in a shorter format for the digital age. These selected moments now reach back fifty years to a dimly remembered civil rights era, when movements led by ordinary citizens uplifted the founding premise of We the People. Their disciplined public trust dispelled cynicism. Their struggles offer abiding lessons for the future.

I had taught seminars in civil rights history since the 1990s, most recently at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Our recent experiments at the University of Baltimore have measured the promise of online learning by the standards of academic rigor. Can a course fairly serve both in-class students and digital participants from Hawaii or Russia? Such problems occupied us through most of 2013.

Now we take the next step. Citizenship & Freedom is not a MOOC. Freedom is not free, but quality education should be affordable.

Course information is available on www.freedomclass.org which includes the 14-week syllabus and registration procedures for several student categories.

I am grateful to the new associate instructor, Dr. Jelani Favors, and to colleagues within the hosting University of Maryland system for their entrepreneurial courage.

Adventures and thickets loom ahead. Updates soon.

Dear Mr. Branch,

 

I am…a junior at Denison University, currently taking a Communication course on Sports in the Media, called “Of Virtue and Horror”. We have discussed and read many controversial issues within sports, both at the professional and college level, as well as gender, race and class issues that arise. These issues are important to me as a Division 3 athlete at Denison.

 

I had a few questions related to “The Shame of College Sports” article, if you have a chance to respond to any of them I would appreciate it. I was fascinated, even shocked, by the corruption within the NCAA and its power over athletes and Universities.

 

I am interested in the origin of the term “student-athlete”, which I know you discussed how it was constructed in order for the NCAA to avoid legal issues - yet do you believe that the term holds any integrity? Is it possible for one to be a student-athlete, particularly in Division 1 athletics?

 

Throughout the course, we have discussed the possibility of separating academic institutions from sports; would you see that as a potential solution to reduce corruption within Universities?

 

What repercussions would you predict to occur if the NCAA were to pay Division 1 athletes? Would there need to be certain criteria based on the skill level or success of certain athletes, on a case by case basis?

 

If you have the opportunity to comment briefly on any one of these questions, I would greatly appreciate it!

 

Thank you for your time,
[Signed]

REPLY

Dear [Signed],

 

Thanks for your interest. Here are some quick comments in response to your three questions.

 

[1] The term “student-athlete” serves no constructive purpose to my mind. I refuse to use it. By repetition, this mantra befuddles people into thinking that college athletes are unique hybrid creatures under NCAA jurisdiction. In fact, athletes are a small fraction of American students with active parallel careers. Some 14 million of the 20 million U.S. undergraduates have full- or part-time jobs while in school, but no one would think to call them “student-cashiers,” “student-teachers,” “student-investors,” or any of the myriad combinations. They are rightly students in the classroom, subject to academic rules, and free citizens in their outside pursuits. The same should hold true for athletes.

 

[2] Separating academics from athletics might make sense for some individual schools, especially those with highly commercialized sports, but the most needed change is clarity about the essential differences between sports and education. Without that, it is difficult or impossible to manage conflict between them with integrity. Currently, through the NCAA, colleges including yours impose on all college athletes a collusive work regimen that is the equivalent of a private tax on students who deliver pizza or give music lessons.

 

[3] No school can or should be required to pay athletes. If, however, the NCAA’s blanket restriction of college athletes is recognized as unfair, bogus, and potentially criminal under the anti-trust laws, colleges must make decisions on a new foundation. For the vast majority of U.S. colleges, bargaining rights for athletes would make little or no difference because there is not enough revenue to create a market for athletic talent. At the big-time sports schools, by contrast, fair markets in a multi-billion-dollar industry would tend to shift compensation from coaches and others to the players. In that case, some schools may choose to abolish revenue sports as incompatible with their academic mission. My guess is that most of the sports-intensive schools will develop separate conferences over time to compete at different financial levels.

 

Justice has been delayed because outsiders dream up every pretext not to address the basic rights of college athletes. They prefer to adjust those rights to convenience rather than the other way around. This is the true shame of college sports, which thankfully is besieged by reform on several fronts.

 

I hope these comments are helpful. The underlying issue is fairly simple, but vested interests and false education confuse things even at universities dedicated to rigorous thought. Please feel free to discuss your concerns further with me by phone.

 

Yours,
Taylor Branch

Join the enthusiastic debate following this article on The Atlantic’s website

Crisis Recognition

The senators and witnesses agreed in a virtual chorus that the structure of NCAA college sports requires major reform. In addition, senators from both political parties agreed that Congress has legal authority to compel changes if necessary. “We have jurisdiction over sports,” Rockefeller said. “All sports. And we have the ability to subpoena.” Republican Senator Dean Heller of Nevada wryly called it “lightning in a bottle” that for once he agreed with his Democratic chairman. “We do have jurisdiction in this Congress over the NCAA,” he said.

If the NCAA awarded truly democratic voting representation to college athletes, it would be a lesser version of political suffrage for women and slaves.

Heller also tempered any assumption that Republicans would defend the status quo or the NCAA from government intrusion. One by one, he branded the NCAA’s proposals for wholesale change an admission of wholesale failure in practice. “If tomorrow there was a bill in front of the United States Senate that would disband the NCAA,” he said to Emmert, “give me the reasons why I shouldn’t vote for that bill.”

Emmert presented seven reforms in progress. While a few are rhetorical, most are concrete and costly enough to be very controversial within the NCAA.

First, college athletes should be guaranteed “scholarships for life” until graduation, rather than the prevailing limit of one-year scholarships renewable at each school’s discretion.

Second, athletic scholarships should be increased to cover the “full cost of attendance.”

Third, the NCAA “should always lead in the area of health and safety.”

Fourth, the NCAA “must work assertively” on sexual assault prevention and support for victims. “This is a national crisis,” he said, citing a new study that some 30 percent of NCAA schools allow their athletic departments to handle allegations of sexual assault by athletes.

Fifth, the NCAA must close “any gaps in coverage” of medical treatment, including a $90,000 deductible in the NCAA’s insurance policy for catastrophic injury.

Sixth, the NCAA must provide college athletes with “the time as well as the resources they need” for academic success.

Seventh, the NCAA must support Title IX protections for female athletes, ensuring that reforms do not come at the expense of the “non-revenue-generating sports.”

No senator opposed these proposals, although Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the committee’s ranking Republican, said they “may disadvantage smaller schools that can’t afford them.” Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, a former Stanford athlete, said he had been “quite taken aback” to learn from a private meeting that Emmert agreed “across the board” with his criticisms of NCAA policy. “Athletes are still exploited,” Booker said. “If they blow out their knee, if they somehow don’t meet the mandates of a coach, they lose their scholarship. They don’t get their degree.”

“If tomorrow there was a bill that would disband the NCAA,” Senator Heller said, “give me the reasons why I shouldn’t vote for that bill.”

When several senators doubted the NCAA’s capacity to deliver such sweeping change, Emmert disclosed that he would rely on a united initiative by all 65 universities from the five major athletic conferences (Southeastern Conference, Atlantic Coast Conference, Big Ten, Big 12, and PAC-12). Rockefeller interrupted to ask how anyone could expect positive leadership from the very schools that have commercialized college sports so aggressively. Emmert replied that they had the essential resources. Republican Senator Dan Coats of Indiana, who represents the NCAA Headquarters in Indianapolis, said he was encouraged because these top universities could exercise power “where these major issues fall.”

Thus, on the crisis front, the hearing revealed that Emmert has formed an internal alliance with the 65 strongest sports powers, bent on pushing tangible benefits for athletes through the NCAA’s full membership of some 1,100 colleges, universities, and athletic conferences.

The “Student-Athlete” vs. “Employee” Model

Senators from both parties worried that extended benefits for college athletes, while necessary and overdue, would undermine their special status. “I think the law here is headed in a very unfortunate direction … of regarding athletes at universities more and more as employees,” stated Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. He said there was a “growing inequality and asymmetry” between the productive but restricted athletes and the colleges harvesting wealth from sports. “That is classically the reason why labor law protections have applied to individuals who are potentially the victims of exploitation,” he told the hearing, “whether it’s in garment factories or at construction sites, or universities.”

Blumenthal said the unwelcome prospect of employee status had advanced markedly since a surprise ruling in March by National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) magistrate Peter Sung Ohr, who granted football players at Northwestern University the option to seek recognition as a trade union. That preliminary decision already has shaken public opinion about the potential standing of athletes. If upheld, it would expose a gaping contradiction between law and the NCAA’s private compact among schools. The NLRB would extend collective bargaining to players who are denied individual bargaining rights. Under NCAA rules, colleges jointly agree to banish any player who seeks or receives an “unauthorized” sports benefit—however small or indirect—for “unethical” conduct.

Several senators dismissed the distant chance of unionized college athletes. Short of that great leap, they questioned the concept of regular employment. Senator Blumenthal expressed a common desire “to return truly to the model of student-athletes … because I, too, as Dr. Emmert has articulated well, value the student-athlete model rather than the employee-employer model.” Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire was troubled by the idea of different treatment for athletes who do and do not produce revenue. “Some will be employees, and some won’t?” she asked. “Some will be student-athletes, and some won’t? I don’t see how that works.” An “employer-employee relationship” in college sports, observed Ayotte, would create “sort of a second category of athlete on campus. I find that bothersome.”

In my judgment, common sense was lost in a fog of terminology about jobs. Undergraduate employment is anything but complicated, fateful, or rare. Of some 20 million students enrolled in the United States, more than 10 million work part-time and another four million hold down full-time employment on the side. These numbers dwarf the 460,000 fellow scholars in college sports. Working students fill hundreds of job categories without being labeled student-waiters, student-legislators, student-librarians, student-entrepreneurs, or the like. Doing so would blur functions and responsibilities that belong rightly in separate spheres.

For six decades, the NCAA has beguiled the world with its crafted phrase “student-athlete.” This hybrid designation, repeated incessantly, aims to cement a fused image of dependent college players. NCAA officials insist that multiple roles would violate the integrity of a “student-athlete” to the point of cutting him or her in half. Their mantra, rejecting career distinctions that are essential and normal elsewhere, defines these hybrids as “students-first” in the sports industry and yet different from others in class. Colleges cooperate by assigning the external, non-teacher NCAA a growing role in the academic certification of athletes. Inevitably, public debate will sort through defensive hysteria about sports jobs on campus.

NCAA Governance

Two major announcements by NCAA President Mark Emmert went relatively unnoticed in the press. First, he declared support for imminent plans to concentrate the NCAA’s governing authority in a small fraction of the membership. Second, he said the NCAA soon may award voting representation to college athletes themselves. The latter shift, if truly democratic, is basic enough to become a lesser sports version of political suffrage for women and slaves.

“In less than a month now,” Emmert told the senate hearing, “the Division I Board will vote on a completely changed decision-making structure that will put all of the subjects we are describing here today in the hands of the 65 universities that have the largest [sports] revenue.” Those universities comprise less than 20 percent of the 350 Division I schools and six percent of the overall NCAA membership. Vesting power in them would breach Emmert’s parallel assertion that the NCAA “is a democratically governed, membership-led association of nearly 1,100 colleges and universities … Members make rules through a representative process much as you do in Congress.”

Working students fill hundreds of job categories without being labeled student-waiters or student-librarians. So why “student-athletes”?

Raw politics peeked from earnest testimony about the NCAA’s stated mission: “to integrate intercollegiate athletics into higher education so that the educational experience of the student-athlete is paramount.” Emmert declared he would use public pressure from the Senate hearing as a “cattle prod” to drive home the structural changes necessary for reform. That means convincing Division I schools to accept hegemony under the 65 sports powers able to stretch their competitive advantage by improving conditions for athletes. Their five dominant sports conferences now own the forthcoming college football playoffs outright, with no share due the NCAA, heralding a bonanza richer and more secure than the NCAA’s broadcasting contract for March Madness basketball. The ascendant conference commissioners, plus television executives in the wings, have sought greater autonomy from the NCAA with hints of secession.

Emmert made the best of being caught in a devil’s bargain. He emphasized that NCAA bylaws give him no vote or formal authority, and Rockefeller lamented the vague lines of accountability. “How can you make the case for saying you can be a participant in all this change,” he asked, “when you say they don’t have to listen to anything you say?” Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri said she felt for Emmert’s plight, “because part of me thinks you’re captured by those you are supposed to regulate … And I can’t tell whether you’re in charge or whether you’re a minion to them.” Asking why he could not secure transparency for crucial proceedings, McCaskill made public a recent NCAA roll call in which most member schools voted—far from guaranteeing athletic scholarships “for life,” or for the four college years—to restore the 40-year ban on scholarship offers longer than one year at a time. “I think you’ll be surprised,” she told fellow senators of the strange coalitions revealed. Harvard, which does not offer athletic scholarships, voted for the one-year limit in order to reduce cost burdens on poorer schools. Sports-mad Texas, whose coaches had pushed for the original 1973 rule, voted likewise in order to maximize control over its athletes.

The senators secured no promise of transparency in college rule-making or finance, which are notoriously opaque. Emmert relieved a gloomy stretch of testimony by volunteering the prospect of NCAA membership for college athletes. Mentioning my earlier praise for the Olympic and Amateur Sports Act of 1978, in which Congress established a voting stake for active athletes on the 39 U.S. Olympic committees, he said his reform package to be voted on in August “will include full representation of students as voting members alongside the presidents and athletic directors on all the [NCAA] legislative bodies.” This news startled me.

Emmert promptly qualified his potential break with the NCAA’s paternal structure, adding that students already hold “advisory” NCAA positions. “If I might, ma’am,” he told Senator McCaskill, “the student-athlete advisory committees advised against putting in the multi-year scholarships, because they happen to agree with coaches that it was a good incentive for their colleagues to remain engaged.” He said student influence explained why some universities voted to restore the one-year limit in the roll-call she had unearthed. “Their very own student-athlete advisory committees said, ‘No, no, no, don’t give multi-year scholarships’,” Emmert testified. “‘We like one-year scholarships’.”

McCaskill looked nonplussed, beyond skeptical. “I would like to talk to those students …” she said. “I have a hard time imagining that any student thinks it’s in their best interest to get a one-year scholarship rather than a four-year scholarship.”

The hearing lurched between revelation and disappointment. Changes menace the NCAA on many fronts, driven mostly by the few universities that have built a multi-billion-dollar side business on talent captured from their undergraduates. Sound governance remains hostage to deadlock, credulity, and shell games, while everyone professes devotion to education for the young. “Congress doesn’t usually follow through,” Rockefeller said in closing. “… I mean the world works in ways that protect itself, but this is a particularly ugly one.”

Transcript of the July 9, 2014 Senate Hearing

The path of adaptation strains upward but rushes ahead. Only a year ago, Simon & Schuster published my compact narrative history, The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement. Based on classroom discussions from Alabama to Idaho, I gave the book an unusual author’s dedication, “For students of freedom and teachers of history.“

Civic education has suffered in part because school standards now emphasize math and reading above history. This is a special hazard in a country founded as a bold experiment to secure freedom in the capacity of citizens for self-government.

Many teachers, under siege, had urged me to preserve the storytelling engagement of my civil rights histories in a shorter format for the digital age. These selected moments now reach back fifty years to a dimly remembered civil rights era, when movements led by ordinary citizens uplifted the founding premise of We the People. Their disciplined public trust dispelled cynicism. Their struggles offer abiding lessons for the future.

I had taught seminars in civil rights history since the 1990s, most recently at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Our recent experiments at the University of Baltimore have measured the promise of online learning by the standards of academic rigor. Can a course fairly serve both in-class students and digital participants from Hawaii or Russia? Such problems occupied us through most of 2013.

Now we take the next step. Citizenship & Freedom is not a MOOC. Freedom is not free, but quality education should be affordable.

Course information is available on www.freedomclass.org which includes the 14-week syllabus and registration procedures for several student categories.

I am grateful to the new associate instructor, Dr. Jelani Favors, and to colleagues within the hosting University of Maryland system for their entrepreneurial courage.

Adventures and thickets loom ahead. Updates soon.

The ceremony took place at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Cold Spring Harbor, NY, where Macy had been christened. Her maternal grandmother, Kay Macy, has belonged there since 1950, and we were blessed to have “Mum” the wedding’s senior attendant at 101 years old! The immediate families posed afterward outside, with brothers Ben Macaskill (l) and Franklin Branch on the flanks.

At the reception, hosted by our new in-laws John and Bridget Macaskill, Macy asked me to sing “My Girl” for her. This was a thrill second only to walking her down the aisle, but there was drama on the stage. Starlight’s bandleader said I was supposed to accompany myself. I panicked. With aplomb, she told me to stall while she urgently recalled musicians from their break.

This video, courtesy of my brother Gary’s cell phone, picks up in mid-stall.

Tradition obliges the father of the bride to offer a toast during the reception dinner. Despite rambling praise, mine did beat the strict 10-minute time limit. What bubbled up included a surprise tribute for Christy, who once saved Macy’s life, and my sister Lucie’s cell phone captured family memories for those who care to indulge them.

All pictures courtesy of Raquel Reis Photography

The public girded for mayhem. NBC’s Meet the Press aired official predictions that it would be “impossible” for Negroes to petition in numbers without civic disorder. A preview in Life magazine surveyed Washington’s “worst case of invasion jitters since the First Battle of Bull Run.” The Kennedy Administration quietly deployed 4,000 riot troops near downtown, with 15,000 paratroopers on alert. A District of Columbia order banned liquor sales for the first time since Prohibition. Local hospitals stockpiled plasma and canceled elective surgery to save beds. Most federal agencies urged employees to stay home. Eighty percent of private business closed for the day. A week ahead, to be safe, Major League Baseball postponed not one but two home games for the Washington Senators.

Early arrivals confounded these apprehensions. One jaunty teenager wafted along Pennsylvania Avenue on roller skates, finishing a week-long journey from Chicago. Trainloads of pilgrims spilled from Union Station singing spirituals. A CBS camera mounted high in the Washington Monument showed a panorama that swelled crowd estimates upwards of 250,000. Bob Dylan strummed his new folk anthem, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and the first black “airline stewardess” led cheers for progress. Rustin herded dignitaries briskly through a long program, allowing emcee A. Philip Randolph to introduce the final speaker ahead of his appointed time.

King looked over a vast spectacle. He had failed this closing task once before from these steps at the Lincoln Memorial, with many of the same civil rights leaders present. Relatively few Americans noticed or remembered his 1957 “Give Us the Ballot” speech, and King himself had pushed for a second chance to define the historical moment. “We are on a breakthrough,” he argued over wiretapped phone lines, startling aides accustomed to his caution, telling them to contact Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, about a “mass protest” for jobs and freedom. King aimed to build on national momentum spiraling from spring demonstrations in Birmingham, but he carried a burden described intimately there in his letter from jail: “…when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at a tip-toe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments…”

He opened his address by reaching back to Lincoln. “Five score years ago,” King paraphrased, “a great American in whose symbolic shadow we stand today signed the Emancipation Proclamation.” Against Lincoln’s fidelity to national purpose, he threw up a clanging image of deadbeat history. “America has given the Negro people a bad check,” King proclaimed, “a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’” He said segregation stamped default on freedom’s core promise. Heartfelt voices cheered his raw illustrations along with his wishful hope not to find always that “the bank of justice is bankrupt.”

Suddenly King balked. He could not bring himself to deliver his carefully written conclusion, beginning with the next line: “And so today, let us go back to our communities as members of the international association for the advancement of creative dissatisfaction.” He improvised a warning not to “wallow in the valley of despair.” Then he stalled for an ending. “I say to you today, my friends, and so,” said King, an orator dancing on edge, “even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow-”

______________________

USA Weekend has published a shorter version of this essay replete with period photographs. View photo essay

______________________

Freedom in 50-Year Blinks

King hesitated before a unique nation that was young and yet also the world’s seasoned pioneer in freedom. The gist of our story fit within three 50-year blinks. In 1813, fighting England, President James Madison pronounced his country “the first genuine democracy engaged in a war since the ancients.” Madison, the Constitution’s chief framer, reluctantly accepted battle to show that a daring experiment in self-government could survive scornful empires abroad and dissent at home. (“It is high time we had a king,” grumbled one doubter in Washington.) Though a slaveholder himself, Madison condemned slavery, and he conceded from firsthand experience that slave power drove nearly every founding compromise of democratic principle. “Great as the evil is,” he lamented, “a dismemberment of the union would be worse.”

Fifty years later, in 1863, President Lincoln stood fast in the crucible of Madison’s fear. Preserving union through a war that doomed slavery, the Emancipator welcomed “a new birth of freedom” at Gettysburg, where he pledged “increased devotion” to the “unfinished work” of “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson dismissed the Lincoln message at Gettysburg’s 50-year commemoration, branding it an “impertinence” to discuss what the Civil War meant. Wilson promptly segregated the federal government by race. On the day he took office, six women on horseback led 5,000 suffragists down Pennsylvania Avenue in classical costumes with breastplates and plumed helmets. Some 200,000 spectators ridiculed their plea for the female vote, heckling them for sex or supper instead, but news of this grand commotion sparked the novel concept of political drama in Washington by citizens at large.

Another fifty years brought King to pause at the Lincoln Memorial. Two World Wars made his United States a preeminent global power. Cherished claims of equal citizenship accommodated whites-only privilege down into public libraries and rest stops, on custom widely reinforced by criminal law. Earlier in 1963, Alabama’s Governor George Wallace vowed to uphold “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” Women had won their suffrage amendment long ago, but Rustin’s marshals still diverted female leaders into a secondary freedom march along Independence Avenue. King, like Madison, saw no rational bridge across the chasms of empathy and perception. Figuratively, he closed his eyes.

A Song with Three Refrains

“-I still have a dream,” King resumed. “It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed…” He took flight extemporaneously on rhetoric ingrained in him but new to the huge national audience. His cadence rose gradually through nine dreams of racial justice into a tenth, spiritual vision from the prophet Isaiah. “I have a dream, that one day every valley shall be exalted,” he said, in pulsing delivery. “Every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together!

“This is our hope,” King continued, pulling back from a glimpse of purified humanity. “This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith…” Like a jazz musician, he composed off this phrase a second riff on determination in pursuit of dreams. “With this faith,” it ended, “we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.” King dramatized that prospect by reciting the first verse of “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” from sweet liberty and pilgrims to “Let freedom ring.”

Quickening again, he pushed his baritone into high register. “And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true,” King intoned. “So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire…Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!” Eleven times he launched variations on this third refrain, embracing not only the treasured landscape but also fearsome bastions of white supremacy. “Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi!” he shouted. “From every mountainside, let freedom ring!” His distinctive voice enveloped the words in a furnace of warring release, fusing ecstasy with anguish and disappointment with hope.

“And when this happens,” King cried out, “when we allow freedom to ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up the day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’”

Reactions Divide History

Most television viewers witnessed their first and last complete King speech that day. “He’s damned good,” President Kennedy remarked at the White House. The New York Times hailed the “Peroration by Dr. King” in one of five front-page stories about the March. Life Magazine, with Rustin pictured nobly on the cover, gushed over scenes of “beatific calm” in a photo essay featuring “Negro Gothic” couples in crisp jeans, “reminiscent of [the] famous Grant Wood painting.” To excuse their prior alarms, Rustin teased, reporters now lionized him as a dark Caribbean wizard whose tricks made scary Negroes nice enough for afternoon tea.

Not everyone shared the admiration and relief. FBI Headquarters produced a hostile assessment that “in light of King’s powerful demagogic speech yesterday, he stands head and shoulders over all other Negro leaders.” This distinction moved Director J. Edgar Hoover to approve a secret FBI directive on King: “We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security.”

Other appraisals ranged from conflicted discovery to confession. Newsweek Magazine compiled a special issue after the March, asking, “How much equality is the white man willing to grant the Negro?” Its polls found that eighty percent of white citizens, including sixty percent of Southerners, said minorities were denied fairness and basic rights, but seventy-four percent also believed “Negroes are moving too fast.”

NBC televised a three-hour news special, American Revolution ’63, in prime time without commercials. Americans sensed “their lives are being altered forever,” said host Frank McGee. His composure slipped in regret of commentaries that had patronized King’s bus boycotters as “teenagers demanding to stay out after 9:30.” News anchor Chet Huntley starkly recalled his Montana childhood. “We were a frontier people,” he said. “…We never really looked with honesty at Negroes the way we examined the anatomy of a grasshopper, say, or speculated on the after-hours life of a teacher. We looked, but we had been told what to see.”

For balance, the NBC documentary presented hardline segregationists. “You are witnessing one more chapter in what has been termed the television revolution,” said Mississippi’s Governor Ross Barnett. Charging that the media “publicized and dramatized the race issue far beyond its relative importance,” he formulated—ironically on network television—a “smoke screen” theory of phony news concocted to help King’s demonstrators and unscrupulous politicians. “The real goal of the conspiracy,” Barnett told NBC viewers, “is the concentration of all effective power in the central government in Washington.”

No one adapted Barnett’s premise more adroitly than George Wallace. By the end of 1963, with segregation losing its stable respectability, he dropped the word altogether from a fresh stump speech denouncing “big government” by “pointy-headed bureaucrats,” tyrannical judges, and “tax, tax, spend, spend” legislators. He spurned racial discourse, calling it favoritism, and insisted with aplomb that he had never denigrated any person or group in his fight for local control. Wallace, though still weighted by a hateful reputation, mounted the first of three strong presidential campaigns. “We have shaken the eyeteeth of every liberal in the country,” he said.

King’s Dream at 50

Now we come to a 50-year blink for the 1963 March on Washington. This will be only the fourth such span since 1813, as noted, which offers a compact perspective on defining themes in American history. King’s “dream” speech, along with the bus protest started by Rosa Parks, is remembered in school lessons for children here and abroad. His statue stands now across the Tidal Basin from Thomas Jefferson, not far from the Lincoln Memorial. Of the official national holidays, only the one for him honors by name a leader who never sought or held public office. King served a prophet’s role. He made urgent the simple but profound challenge that runs through American heritage. Putting one foot in the Constitution and the other in Scriptures, he refined an ecumenical standard of equal votes and equal souls.

Oratory alone cannot explain King’s impact. He spoke for a nonviolent citizens’ movement that engaged representatives of the nation, in his words, to “rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.” Sacrifice amplified the speeches, and most bloodshed in the civil rights era followed the 1963 March, beginning with the grisly church bombing eighteen days later that killed four Birmingham girls. Ku Klux Klan murders came hard upon the Kennedy assassination, from three students lynched in Mississippi to a Boston pastor beaten to death on a voting-rights march in Selma, and a dozen more martyrs preceded King himself in 1968.

By then the movement had opened stubborn gates to freedom. The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 reduced not only segregation’s rank injustice but also a paralyzing stigma on the white South, leading to Sunbelt prosperity. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 stripped white supremacy from democracy’s bedrock franchise, enabling the first two-party competition in the South since the Civil War. Laws that criminalized racial intermarriage in most states fell void, along with many state laws that curtailed or prohibited jury service by women.

Such blatant restrictions have become difficult for new generations to remember, or believe, but female students had been barred from many professions and most prominent colleges, let alone from the military academies. Segregated sports persisted beyond King’s life, as the 1969 Texas Longhorns were the last all-white college football team to win a national championship. The notion of female rabbis, which was preposterous for two thousand years of rabbinic Judaism, became commonplace soon after the civil rights struggle. Collateral citizens’ movements advanced marginalized causes from disabled persons to the natural environment. Homosexual people emerged, beyond the imagination of King’s dreamers, from closeted terror to legal security approaching gay marriage. Negroes shifted collective identity to black people, then African Americans, and the nation elected one of them President of the United States.

President Barack Obama stands at a pinnacle of breathtaking change since 1963, but he has scarcely escaped an undertow from the past. Like King in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, the president himself remains “constantly at a tip-toe stance.” It is a delicate matter for him to mention race at all, no matter how much it might inform his experience. Recently, when he expressed qualified identification with Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African American teenager tracked and killed with impunity in Florida, criticism erupted that President Obama was injecting himself and racial friction into matters best left alone. The New York Times quoted a complaint that his remarks betrayed “the great achievement of our society, the possibility of not talking about race.”

This uproar exposes a dangerous wish. To silence race collapses American history into a fairy tale, blotting out the central drama of democratic progress. The original framers of the Constitution boldly designed horizontal ties across sensitive barriers of hierarchy, region, and belief. Race has tested them ever since, and only subterfuge or willful amnesia can deny its residual force. Race flipped the century-old “solid South” from Democratic to Republican after 1964. Dragnets now search predominantly black teenagers to confiscate guns in New York, while zealous coalitions elsewhere stockpile guns into predominantly white hands—all professing a race-neutral public safety. Partisan gridlock is racial by the numbers. The House of Representatives has packed itself into Democratic districts that average twice the non-white population compared with Republican districts that average fifty percent more white people. One national party tends to be skittish about race. The other transmutes latent fear and distrust into a pervasive hostility toward government.

King’s “dream” speech abides. Contrary to popular impression then, and lingering insistence today, he did not win favor by promising that African Americans would behave like white people. He said nearly the opposite, quite plainly. His ringing conclusion invited polyglot America—“all God’s children”—to join hands and sing a Negro spiritual, so that everyone for that moment could share inspirations forged during slavery. King invoked a larger patriotism in which people of every stripe reach from tip-toe stance across divisions between them. Free citizenship requires meeting each other half-way to build ties of comfort and strength. King’s burden was not the tip-toe stance itself but flatfooted disregard on the other side. His reward was small miracles of common purpose that made “movement” the watchword of national politics.

Now the watchword has atrophied to “spin,” cynical and stationary. The glory of freedom is still there, however, in far better shape than our fractured discourse suggests. President Obama should speak more from his tip-toe stance about race in our national journey. Spasms of objection can give way to more balanced history, but we all inherit the responsibility to make it so. King and his colleagues leave us a patriotic lesson that every citizen can become a modern Founder.

Taylor Branch wrote a prize-winning historical trilogy on the civil rights era, beginning with Parting the Waters (1988). His recent books are The Cartel (2011), about NCAA college sports, and The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement (2013). He lives in Baltimore with his wife, Christy Macy.