Seem to be marking anniversaries these days, looking back to acts of social courage, of civil disobedience and peaceful protest which have become enshrined in history, memory, art and sometimes in statues of granite. I think we’re doing so with The March on Washington and the “I Have a Dream” speech with more emphasis than usual now not just because we’ve reached a nice round number like 50, but because we know in our minds that we need to shake icons like Dr. King loose from the granite.

I believe we watch these videos to bring back to ourselves the reality and the possibility of a young man named Martin and a whole lot of other young men and women who gathered together to do something controversial, not universally lauded or endorsed in their time, but rather an act of conscience and consciousness with the hope and conviction that doesn’t need that lauding or endorsement. Real people, real courage, which are very different things from icons and fearlessness.

At the time, the speech got King targeted for increased surveillance by the FBI, labeled by them as the “most dangerous negro in America” on the one hand, and by Malcolm X as an effete compromiser on the other. Nothing good or important happens without criticism; it’s how you know you’re actually doing something. We’re all feeling pretty well surveilled nowadays in the U.S., and on the criticism front, unless you’ve invoked the ire of FOX News or other corporatist lap dogs in, say, any effort to find a way towards something that resembles real democracy in America, one would have to have to question if they were really on the right path or actually having any meaningful impact.

There are so many times to get chills listening to this whole speech again…

“I have a dream that one day, this nation rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed, ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'”

“Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we are free at last.”

And I did get those chills just now watching it, but I also found myself keying in on not just the loft, but the down-to-earth, the advice, the practical, and there is a lot of practicality in that 50 year old speech that could well instruct today:

“This is no time…to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.”

“We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plain of dignity and discipline”

“Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality….Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina….Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.”

And there’s a reason too that he uses song verses in the speech, why the video above starts with a song, and why that movement was so infused with music. When we care about something so deeply, when we feel it in our bones the need to create change, we as a society convey that through the mediums that matter most to us, through our most powerful ways to communicate deeply held beliefs and to express those emotions that can no longer be contained without being given voice. Music is one of those means. One of the best in fact.

We will get back there, to a place where we do that en masse. This idea that the protest song is dead has been a shortsighted extrapolation from the part of the cycle we’ve been in here in America, where music is mostly just used for entertainment and marketing. It will turn back shortly, as it always does. Music has been with us as long as we’ve been around to communicate. It’s with every society, with all peoples, and as enough in this one decide to care and to detox from the drugs of gradualism and defeatism, we’ll relegate the Miley Cyrus’s to the side show status they deserve and get back to more communicating of things that matter through one of our very best mediums to do so, music. There are plenty of places in the world that haven’t forgotten music’s power and plenty people who still know its importance in creating change, we work in some of those places and with some of those people. And there will be more.
-Hunter

Aug. 28, 1963 The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gestures during his "I Have a Dream" speech as he addresses thousands of civil rights supporters gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, D.C. (AP Photo)