27
I Have a Dream

I planned an early night myself. There was nothing on the television except the usual race riots and civil unrest. I watched in utter dismay as people of Colour were beaten by batons and snarled at by police dogs. I saw powerful firehoses turned on sobbing Black schoolchildren and I wondered what kind of a world we were living in.

I was about to switch the damned thing off, when the Brylcreemed news anchor started talking about an extraordinary event that had taken place that very day in Washington DC. I began to realize that, as Pip and Hannah and I had been bowling blissfully along the highway, history had been happening in the capital of this great and troubled land.

Now I sat upright in my bed and stared in wonder at this event they were calling ‘The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom’. On this hot, heaving, historic day of 28th August 1963, a quarter of a million people of every race, creed and colour had streamed out of buses and coaches to follow marching bands towards the Lincoln Memorial.

Now sleep seemed a distant thing as I watched this march for equality. I saw a colossal crowd chanting and waving banners and flags – the young, the poor and the educated; even representatives of Native Americans Indians were there. I watched the weathered faces of old Coloured folk, who had suffered lifetimes of indignity and oppression. These were the people who had been used and abused to build this mighty industrial nation, and now, like Rosa Parks on the segregated bus, the day had dawned when they were saying, ‘Enough!’

As hundreds of policemen waited nervously at the sidelines, I waited for the whole thing to erupt into violence. But it never did. Perhaps the slow train of change was coming at last.

A stage had been assembled in front of the great marble statue of Abraham Lincoln – the president who had overseen the abolishment of slavery one hundred years before. The steps to the memorial bristled with microphones and cameras and I saw many celebrities waiting to speak – all my heroes were there: Marlon Brando, Sammy Davis Jr, Sidney Poitier, Joan Baez . . . I swear to you I saw Bob Dylan himself, fresh-faced, with a mop of unruly hair and guitar in hand.

But the final speaker was in a different league. The final speaker was none other than the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr himself and I cannot describe the effect that electric speech had upon me. Visibly shaking with emotion, the great man gave a sermon like I have never heard before – a poem almost, that summoned up the poor Black children of America who had suffered so long, for no reason other than the colour of their skins. He evoked the mountains, plains and rivers of that great country – the hills of prejudice, which would be laid low by the mighty voice of Justice.

I had the weird impression that the fellow was speaking directly to me – to Jack Morrow from Dublin, Ireland. Wide-awake in my Kozy Kabin, as hot tears of hope sprang from my eyes.

Then Dr King raised his hands to the heavens like the great preacher he was – ‘I have a dream,’ he proclaimed, ‘that a day will come in which the children and grand– children of slaves will sit together with the children and grandchildren of slave owners at the table of Equality’.

Shaking his finger with rapture and rage, his words vibrated through the booming speakers, across Washington and out into the world . . . Oh, my brothers and sisters, I have a dream!

At long last, when I stirred myself to switch off the TV, I was surprised to catch the murmuring of the same programme from next door. Could it be that someone else was sharing this moment of history? Could it be that Hannah had watched it too?

Before I slept, I wondered if it had touched that deep-thinking girl as powerfully as it had affected me.