What have we accomplished since Martin Luther King, Jr. Spoke his “I Had a Dream” from the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963
I have read the “I Had a Dream” speech several times. It always impresses me with the eloquence and majesty of the words he said that day. There were over 200,000 people there that day. They came by car, bus, train, bicycle and one person skated from Chicago. The crowd was filled with freedom fighters, people who wanted to have hope, people who were tired of being beat down, and people who just wanted their lives to matter not just to their family but to the whole of society. There were policemen and soldiers ready in case a riot broke out. It didn’t. It was as Martin Luther King, Jr. wanted – a peaceful protest.
Four hundred years before in 1526, slavery was established in the Americas. Three hundred years before in 1673, Maryland legalized slavery. They would also pass a law that stated that a white woman who married a slave would become a slave herself until all her children were gone. This was because white women can lose their mind. Later they changed the law to state that white men were logical and thus being involved with a slave woman was not a problem. Two hundred years before in 1763, in the country of Guyana, the people revolted against the Dutch settlers who had profited from the slave trade by sending Africans to the Americas as slaves. This revolt almost ended the slave trade but didn’t succeed.
One hundred years before on August 28, 1963, the Civil War was heading towards Chickamauga in upper Georgia and just below Chattanooga, Tennessee. The actual battle took place on September 19-20, 1863. My great-grandfather John Henry Rainey was a teenage boy living in Walker County Georgia. Neither he nor his father had joined the Confederate Army. They were pacifist Methodist. My mother told me that John Henry had told her of hearing the battle with men and horses dying. The Union would lose that battle, but it was a turning point in the war because the Confederates got cocky and knew they were going to win. The Union on the other hand sent General Sherman to bring the south down. It was a war that needed to be fought. Because those that kept slaves were never going to willingly let them be free. This war would end legalized slave trade. Unfortunately today there is still forms of slavery in human trafficking especially in the sex trades.
For a few years after the Civil War there was reconstruction in which there came to the forefront African Americans who made a mark in the world. They became senators, representatives, in statehouses and they owned businesses. But people never like it when they lose power, and after reconstruction stopped one of the failures of our country, the Jim Crow laws began. The KKK was born in Tennessee in 1865 and grew as a secret society.
The KKK and Jim Crow laws ruled the south and controlled it. Because KKK members were secret, no one knew if the person they were talking to was a member or not. People feared. White people who did not like what was happening kept quiet because it might be them that was targeted, but African Americans got the blunt of it. They had to go to the back doors of businesses. They had to wait until all the whites had been served. They could not use public restrooms. In schools they had substandard schools. Martin Luther King, jr. entered college at 15 years of age because high school was so substandard that he could not have gotten a good education. My friend Brenda explained that to me. In Louisiana, schools for African American children only went to the eighth grade. Education was not equal. Just read the words of the students who attended Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in the late fifties. As they went to school they were spit upon, called vile names, and those children were walking into a war zone. The federal government had to intervene with soldiers guarding those children.
African Americans were not allowed to ride in the front of the bus. They had to sit in the back of the bus and if a white person wanted their seat they had to give it to them or be arrested. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. She was arrested. She was not the first African American woman to do that, but the first was a fifteen-year-old girl named Claudette Colvin, and Rosa Parks was older and married. She was a victim that the whites of the community could not disdain except for the color of her skin. Rosa Parks had also been one of those who attempted to get justice for Recy Taylor, an African American woman who was raped by six white men in 1944, but they were found innocent of the rape. The Montgomery Bus Boycott began on December 5, 1955 and lasted until December 20, 1956. Segregation on buses stopped. This was done by peacefully protesting and making sure that each African American in Montgomery got to and from work. Many walked, others car pooled, and some white employers made sure their African American workers were there to work. Their businesses depended on it. This was a major undertaking, and it was a success. Martin Luther King, jr. was involved with the Montgomery Improvement Committee which did the behind-the-scenes work for this boycott to be a success.
But three months before all of this was an event that would be a catalyst for bringing the Civil Rights Movement to the forefront of national awareness. Eight years before MLK spoke his “I Had a Dream” speech, Emmitt Till was murdered for whistling at a white woman Carolyn Bryant whose husband Roy Bryant and his half-brother J. W. Milam sought to make Emmitt pay for doing that. Emmitt was only fourteen years old. He was not a man but a boy who maybe thought he was grown because teenage boys do that. Emmitt was from Chicago where there was city wide segregation of the races which also included segregation of people from Ireland and Poland from other whites. He knew about segregation but not about the Jim Crow laws. Emmitt Till was visiting his great uncle in Money, Mississippi. Milam and Bryant kidnapped Emmitt at gunpoint and took him to a barn where three African American men would testify that they saw and heard the physical abuse and murder of Emmitt Till. Emmitt’s body was thrown into the Tallahatchie River. On September 1, 1955, a fisherman found the body. Unlike all the other lynching of that era, Emmitt’s body would not be buried in the south, and quietly dismissed by society. His mother demanded his return. Mamie Till Bradley had an open coffin so the world could see what had happened to her son. The world saw and was disgusted. Except those that ruled the south with an iron hand. There had been battles for civil rights before but they had been mostly lost, but with Emmitt Till’s death the war for Civil Rights had begun.
On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King, jr. addressed not what was wrong in the sense that he pointed a finger at how African Americans had been wronged, but in pointing out the wrongs that were his hopes. He wanted us to live peacefully together. He wanted us not to distinguish between people of color and white people. He wanted us to see that people of color lives matter in that most fundamental way…that their lives are noticed. He wanted whites to understand that language and how we address people matters.
I didn’t totally get this for a long time. I did not completely grasp the concept that was being presented by Black Lives Matter. To me all people matter, I had been raised in a home where anyone who came to our house sat at our table, and ate with us. Before new people came, my father would explain to us the different cultures, especially when it came to religion. We were charged with being respectful when asking questions. My father taught me to never take the dignity of anyone because it might be all that the person owns. My mother was well read in politics. I remember her listening to Eisenhower speaking to the nation on the desegregation of school. She told us that everyone deserved a fair education. I worked with people of different races when I worked as a foster care caseworker. I came to dislike one group of people and that was those that sexually abused children. Still, I did not understand.
But God has a way of opening a person’s eyes to what is wrong in this world. He sent good loving people into my life. He sent people who allowed me to ask questions. One was a dear foster parent who was caring for four of the children on my caseload. I had come to pick them up for a visit with their mother. Just as we started going out the door, she stopped me, and said, “You can’t take them. They are looking ashy.” I was confused. I had never heard that term. She rubbed Vaseline on them, and when I came back with them an hour later, she laughed at my confusion, and said simply, “You didn’t understand what ashy meant.” She explained it to me. She then said, “I know you have a white mama, but I will be your black mama, and you can ask me any question you want, and I will answer you.” I took advantage of that from time to time after work I would stop just for a little bit of time before going home. She was full of stories and was one of the kindest people that I ever knew. When she died I and another caseworker attended her going home funeral, and I knew I had lost a very precious person in my life. All these people made me understand what most white people do not understand that simply noticing that a person’s life is valuable no matter who they are or where they live, or the color of their skin is one of the kindest things, we can do with the people we come in contact with each day.
Sadly, that is not happening. A couple of weeks ago, there was a story about a woman whose mother sent her north to attend school back in the sixties so that she could be better educated. She talked of her longing to be home. I get that part completely. I also understood the sacrifice that her mother made sending her daughter away for a better future. It was an act of love. I read the comments. They were cruel, bigoted, and racist. I simply stated that I had read books of what it was like being African American in that era in the south. The response came from one person, and she called me a multicolored haired imbecile. She meant to hurt me. I told her I was sad for her name calling hurt her more than it hurt me.
Recently I read a book about the unsolved and uncharged murders or mostly African Americans across our country. It was difficult to read. It was difficult to read because of all the murders done by white policemen who almost always said the person killed had a gun or knife. Witnesses said otherwise. These murders were only until the year 1970 and from 1934. They were about seven hundred murders I read. None of the people who committed the murders were prosecuted.
On October 20, 1920, my grandfather Frank Addison Todd murdered Utz Earle who was protecting his daughter from my grandfather. I never knew my grandfather because he died before I was born. He was convicted of his crime but only got three to five years for manslaughter. I read some of his testimony. Most of it was lost. It sickened me. I have wondered how my father became such a kind man. He had examples as a young man. He learned to play the harmonica and the blues from an unnamed African American man. He was one of several that took my father hunting with them. But back to the murder, two things stood out. I learned that my great Aunt Grace Todd Watt who was a postmistress at this time was working, and two white men came into see her and said, “We heard your brother Frank killed us one last night.” It was how she learned of the murder. It made her sick, and she closed the post office for that day. The other was what the Judge wrote to the Supreme Court. He stated that Mr. Todd should have gotten more time but that he was afraid that no white man would be convicted of killing a “colored person” in the state if he did.” On April 10, 1921, one day before my father became six years old, Frank A. Todd was convicted of manslaughter. He became a trustee on the chain gang, meaning a prisoner in charge of other prisoners. His wife, my Grannie, became cook and laundress on the chain gang and my father and sisters spent part of their childhood living in tents on the chain gang. I have no doubt that my Papa Frank was a cruel man to those other prisoners, to his wife and to his children.
We need to leave the cruelty of the past behind us, but we haven’t.
We need to get beyond this. We need to stop thinking of ourselves as better than the other guy. We have all been born and we will all die. What matters in our lives is not the money we earn, the places we live, the cars we drive, the people we know, the schools we have attended- none of those matters. All that matters is this- have we been kind to people we encounter and have we been patient with them. It has always been not about us but about the person we meet, whether they are the cashier, the politician, the child, the taxi driver, the teacher, the friend, the lover, our family, has been treated kindly by us and we have been patient with them. I am working on the patient part.
It is basically what Martin Luther King, jr. was asking from our nation on August 28, 1963, for African Americans to be treated fairly, for them to be treated kindly, and to be given patience. We are not there yet, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t get there one day. It is what I pray will happen.
Ever in Christ’s love,
Mary Elizabeth Todd
1/16/2023
I have read the “I Had a Dream” speech several times. It always impresses me with the eloquence and majesty of the words he said that day. There were over 200,000 people there that day. They came by car, bus, train, bicycle and one person skated from Chicago. The crowd was filled with freedom fighters, people who wanted to have hope, people who were tired of being beat down, and people who just wanted their lives to matter not just to their family but to the whole of society. There were policemen and soldiers ready in case a riot broke out. It didn’t. It was as Martin Luther King, Jr. wanted – a peaceful protest.
Four hundred years before in 1526, slavery was established in the Americas. Three hundred years before in 1673, Maryland legalized slavery. They would also pass a law that stated that a white woman who married a slave would become a slave herself until all her children were gone. This was because white women can lose their mind. Later they changed the law to state that white men were logical and thus being involved with a slave woman was not a problem. Two hundred years before in 1763, in the country of Guyana, the people revolted against the Dutch settlers who had profited from the slave trade by sending Africans to the Americas as slaves. This revolt almost ended the slave trade but didn’t succeed.
One hundred years before on August 28, 1963, the Civil War was heading towards Chickamauga in upper Georgia and just below Chattanooga, Tennessee. The actual battle took place on September 19-20, 1863. My great-grandfather John Henry Rainey was a teenage boy living in Walker County Georgia. Neither he nor his father had joined the Confederate Army. They were pacifist Methodist. My mother told me that John Henry had told her of hearing the battle with men and horses dying. The Union would lose that battle, but it was a turning point in the war because the Confederates got cocky and knew they were going to win. The Union on the other hand sent General Sherman to bring the south down. It was a war that needed to be fought. Because those that kept slaves were never going to willingly let them be free. This war would end legalized slave trade. Unfortunately today there is still forms of slavery in human trafficking especially in the sex trades.
For a few years after the Civil War there was reconstruction in which there came to the forefront African Americans who made a mark in the world. They became senators, representatives, in statehouses and they owned businesses. But people never like it when they lose power, and after reconstruction stopped one of the failures of our country, the Jim Crow laws began. The KKK was born in Tennessee in 1865 and grew as a secret society.
The KKK and Jim Crow laws ruled the south and controlled it. Because KKK members were secret, no one knew if the person they were talking to was a member or not. People feared. White people who did not like what was happening kept quiet because it might be them that was targeted, but African Americans got the blunt of it. They had to go to the back doors of businesses. They had to wait until all the whites had been served. They could not use public restrooms. In schools they had substandard schools. Martin Luther King, jr. entered college at 15 years of age because high school was so substandard that he could not have gotten a good education. My friend Brenda explained that to me. In Louisiana, schools for African American children only went to the eighth grade. Education was not equal. Just read the words of the students who attended Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in the late fifties. As they went to school they were spit upon, called vile names, and those children were walking into a war zone. The federal government had to intervene with soldiers guarding those children.
African Americans were not allowed to ride in the front of the bus. They had to sit in the back of the bus and if a white person wanted their seat they had to give it to them or be arrested. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. She was arrested. She was not the first African American woman to do that, but the first was a fifteen-year-old girl named Claudette Colvin, and Rosa Parks was older and married. She was a victim that the whites of the community could not disdain except for the color of her skin. Rosa Parks had also been one of those who attempted to get justice for Recy Taylor, an African American woman who was raped by six white men in 1944, but they were found innocent of the rape. The Montgomery Bus Boycott began on December 5, 1955 and lasted until December 20, 1956. Segregation on buses stopped. This was done by peacefully protesting and making sure that each African American in Montgomery got to and from work. Many walked, others car pooled, and some white employers made sure their African American workers were there to work. Their businesses depended on it. This was a major undertaking, and it was a success. Martin Luther King, jr. was involved with the Montgomery Improvement Committee which did the behind-the-scenes work for this boycott to be a success.
But three months before all of this was an event that would be a catalyst for bringing the Civil Rights Movement to the forefront of national awareness. Eight years before MLK spoke his “I Had a Dream” speech, Emmitt Till was murdered for whistling at a white woman Carolyn Bryant whose husband Roy Bryant and his half-brother J. W. Milam sought to make Emmitt pay for doing that. Emmitt was only fourteen years old. He was not a man but a boy who maybe thought he was grown because teenage boys do that. Emmitt was from Chicago where there was city wide segregation of the races which also included segregation of people from Ireland and Poland from other whites. He knew about segregation but not about the Jim Crow laws. Emmitt Till was visiting his great uncle in Money, Mississippi. Milam and Bryant kidnapped Emmitt at gunpoint and took him to a barn where three African American men would testify that they saw and heard the physical abuse and murder of Emmitt Till. Emmitt’s body was thrown into the Tallahatchie River. On September 1, 1955, a fisherman found the body. Unlike all the other lynching of that era, Emmitt’s body would not be buried in the south, and quietly dismissed by society. His mother demanded his return. Mamie Till Bradley had an open coffin so the world could see what had happened to her son. The world saw and was disgusted. Except those that ruled the south with an iron hand. There had been battles for civil rights before but they had been mostly lost, but with Emmitt Till’s death the war for Civil Rights had begun.
On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King, jr. addressed not what was wrong in the sense that he pointed a finger at how African Americans had been wronged, but in pointing out the wrongs that were his hopes. He wanted us to live peacefully together. He wanted us not to distinguish between people of color and white people. He wanted us to see that people of color lives matter in that most fundamental way…that their lives are noticed. He wanted whites to understand that language and how we address people matters.
I didn’t totally get this for a long time. I did not completely grasp the concept that was being presented by Black Lives Matter. To me all people matter, I had been raised in a home where anyone who came to our house sat at our table, and ate with us. Before new people came, my father would explain to us the different cultures, especially when it came to religion. We were charged with being respectful when asking questions. My father taught me to never take the dignity of anyone because it might be all that the person owns. My mother was well read in politics. I remember her listening to Eisenhower speaking to the nation on the desegregation of school. She told us that everyone deserved a fair education. I worked with people of different races when I worked as a foster care caseworker. I came to dislike one group of people and that was those that sexually abused children. Still, I did not understand.
But God has a way of opening a person’s eyes to what is wrong in this world. He sent good loving people into my life. He sent people who allowed me to ask questions. One was a dear foster parent who was caring for four of the children on my caseload. I had come to pick them up for a visit with their mother. Just as we started going out the door, she stopped me, and said, “You can’t take them. They are looking ashy.” I was confused. I had never heard that term. She rubbed Vaseline on them, and when I came back with them an hour later, she laughed at my confusion, and said simply, “You didn’t understand what ashy meant.” She explained it to me. She then said, “I know you have a white mama, but I will be your black mama, and you can ask me any question you want, and I will answer you.” I took advantage of that from time to time after work I would stop just for a little bit of time before going home. She was full of stories and was one of the kindest people that I ever knew. When she died I and another caseworker attended her going home funeral, and I knew I had lost a very precious person in my life. All these people made me understand what most white people do not understand that simply noticing that a person’s life is valuable no matter who they are or where they live, or the color of their skin is one of the kindest things, we can do with the people we come in contact with each day.
Sadly, that is not happening. A couple of weeks ago, there was a story about a woman whose mother sent her north to attend school back in the sixties so that she could be better educated. She talked of her longing to be home. I get that part completely. I also understood the sacrifice that her mother made sending her daughter away for a better future. It was an act of love. I read the comments. They were cruel, bigoted, and racist. I simply stated that I had read books of what it was like being African American in that era in the south. The response came from one person, and she called me a multicolored haired imbecile. She meant to hurt me. I told her I was sad for her name calling hurt her more than it hurt me.
Recently I read a book about the unsolved and uncharged murders or mostly African Americans across our country. It was difficult to read. It was difficult to read because of all the murders done by white policemen who almost always said the person killed had a gun or knife. Witnesses said otherwise. These murders were only until the year 1970 and from 1934. They were about seven hundred murders I read. None of the people who committed the murders were prosecuted.
On October 20, 1920, my grandfather Frank Addison Todd murdered Utz Earle who was protecting his daughter from my grandfather. I never knew my grandfather because he died before I was born. He was convicted of his crime but only got three to five years for manslaughter. I read some of his testimony. Most of it was lost. It sickened me. I have wondered how my father became such a kind man. He had examples as a young man. He learned to play the harmonica and the blues from an unnamed African American man. He was one of several that took my father hunting with them. But back to the murder, two things stood out. I learned that my great Aunt Grace Todd Watt who was a postmistress at this time was working, and two white men came into see her and said, “We heard your brother Frank killed us one last night.” It was how she learned of the murder. It made her sick, and she closed the post office for that day. The other was what the Judge wrote to the Supreme Court. He stated that Mr. Todd should have gotten more time but that he was afraid that no white man would be convicted of killing a “colored person” in the state if he did.” On April 10, 1921, one day before my father became six years old, Frank A. Todd was convicted of manslaughter. He became a trustee on the chain gang, meaning a prisoner in charge of other prisoners. His wife, my Grannie, became cook and laundress on the chain gang and my father and sisters spent part of their childhood living in tents on the chain gang. I have no doubt that my Papa Frank was a cruel man to those other prisoners, to his wife and to his children.
We need to leave the cruelty of the past behind us, but we haven’t.
We need to get beyond this. We need to stop thinking of ourselves as better than the other guy. We have all been born and we will all die. What matters in our lives is not the money we earn, the places we live, the cars we drive, the people we know, the schools we have attended- none of those matters. All that matters is this- have we been kind to people we encounter and have we been patient with them. It has always been not about us but about the person we meet, whether they are the cashier, the politician, the child, the taxi driver, the teacher, the friend, the lover, our family, has been treated kindly by us and we have been patient with them. I am working on the patient part.
It is basically what Martin Luther King, jr. was asking from our nation on August 28, 1963, for African Americans to be treated fairly, for them to be treated kindly, and to be given patience. We are not there yet, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t get there one day. It is what I pray will happen.
Ever in Christ’s love,
Mary Elizabeth Todd
1/16/2023