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American Morning
'I Have a Dream...'
Aired August 27, 2003 - 08:35 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Tomorrow marks the 40th anniversary of the "I have a dream" speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The speech was part of a massive civil rights march on Washington D.C. His moving address and the march made history.
CNN's senior analyst Jeff Greenfield covered the march as a college student, and he joins us this morning to talk about it.
Good morning. I am just so fascinated when people share what they felt and saw that day at the march. Give me a sense of how it was to be in the middle of this gigantic crowd of people, most of them black?
JEFF GREENFIELD, CNN SR. ANALYST: yes. Well, the most memorable part of it obviously was the speech. And I have to say, it was one of those moments when you sense that this was something memorable from the moment King got up.
But what I remember being struck by was how optimistic and how buoyant the crowd was. It was by far the happiest protest march I've ever seen.
You've got to remember, there was a great fear at that time that the march was going to turn violent. The Kennedy administration tried to talk King and the organizers out of the whole idea. But once everybody got there, the sheer size of the crowd, I think, made everybody feel as if it had been a success from the get-go. And one of the keys was that organized labor, whose record on integration was under great challenge, particularly in the craft unions, threw itself into the march. They provided a lot of money and organization and foot soldiers.
And what I -- I have this memory still it gets to me, walking through a black neighborhood in Washington and seeing people on their stoops, on the street waving, offering water, and one very old man weeping, tears streaming down his face, chanting almost over and over, "All my life, I've been waiting to see this day coming to pass." It was a very inclusive, multiracial demonstration, very broad theme, march on Washington for jobs and freedom. And I think it was a highwater mark for that kind of effort.
O'BRIEN: A success, then, across the board. And yet when you look at the politics to come out of that march has sort of turned more confrontational.
GREENFIELD: Well, in fact, for a time, everyone thought this multiracial, inclusive theme would work. But even at the time of the march, King and other veteran civil rights workers were under pressure from a much more militant kind of black politics and culture. There was Malcolm X, the spokesman for black Muslims, arguing that whites were simply not to be trusted. Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee got the phrase "nonviolence" out of their name; they didn't want it.
And within a year and a half of that march, the Vietnam War escalated, and I think that drove a wedge between liberals. Some said, look, civil rights is still the issue, don't protest the war, we've got a friend Lyndon Johnson in the White House. Others said the first priority was to stop the war, so that really split that coalition.
O'BRIEN: You say in addition to that there were some unintended political consequences that came out of this march. What do you mean?
GREENFIELD: Yes, and I think that's something really important. It's very hard to remember this, but back in the early '60s the black vote in the United States was very much up for grabs. Eisenhower had done well with it. Nixon in 1960 had competed for it. Liberal and moderate Republicans in Congress often pointed to southern Democrats who were mostly segregationists as the obstacle.
But after King's march and Kennedy's death that November, President Johnson swung all the might of the White House behind two civil rights bills, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Meanwhile, the 1964 Republican nominee Barry Goldwater opposed those laws, and the consequences were, first the black vote became solidly Democratic to this day. And second, many Southern whites were pushed away from the Democratic party. You had George Wallace, even in 1964, ran in three primaries outside the South and did pretty well. That same year Senator Strom Thurmond left the Democratic Party for the Republicans, the first of many. So the very success of the civil rights movement in the South, at least, led to a now-dominant Republican Party.
O'BRIEN: In the time since that speech, there have been about 20 zillion political marches and speeches, and you say there are important lessons that people should take from that march and apply to their own.
GREENFIELD: Well, it seems to me, and this is no original insight on my part, but it's true I think that King's great insight was to link his cause with a message of patriotism. His revolutionary rhetoric literally came from the American Revolution. The first part of that famous speech quotes from the Declaration of Independence. So what King was saying was, if you mean what you say about American ideals, this discrimination has to stop.
I think later movements, led by members, some of them seem to be saying that the whole American system was corrupt, hypocritical and malevolent. That pretty much is a guarantee you're not going to succeed. By putting a protest march into the frame of this is what America should mean, I think it's in a political and strategic sense, that's what a lot of later movements were missing. O'BRIEN: Do you remember that day today as clearly as you did back then?
GREENFIELD: When I think of that old man on the stoop weeping and chanting, overcome by emotion, it's 40 years ago, and it moves me literally to this day and this moment. I will never forget it, and never forget the hair standing up on the back of my neck as king started to speak. You had the sense of, whoa, this is one for the history books.
O'BRIEN: Wow, what a remarkable day.
Jeff Greenfield, thanks, as always.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
Aired August 27, 2003 - 08:35 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Tomorrow marks the 40th anniversary of the "I have a dream" speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The speech was part of a massive civil rights march on Washington D.C. His moving address and the march made history.
CNN's senior analyst Jeff Greenfield covered the march as a college student, and he joins us this morning to talk about it.
Good morning. I am just so fascinated when people share what they felt and saw that day at the march. Give me a sense of how it was to be in the middle of this gigantic crowd of people, most of them black?
JEFF GREENFIELD, CNN SR. ANALYST: yes. Well, the most memorable part of it obviously was the speech. And I have to say, it was one of those moments when you sense that this was something memorable from the moment King got up.
But what I remember being struck by was how optimistic and how buoyant the crowd was. It was by far the happiest protest march I've ever seen.
You've got to remember, there was a great fear at that time that the march was going to turn violent. The Kennedy administration tried to talk King and the organizers out of the whole idea. But once everybody got there, the sheer size of the crowd, I think, made everybody feel as if it had been a success from the get-go. And one of the keys was that organized labor, whose record on integration was under great challenge, particularly in the craft unions, threw itself into the march. They provided a lot of money and organization and foot soldiers.
And what I -- I have this memory still it gets to me, walking through a black neighborhood in Washington and seeing people on their stoops, on the street waving, offering water, and one very old man weeping, tears streaming down his face, chanting almost over and over, "All my life, I've been waiting to see this day coming to pass." It was a very inclusive, multiracial demonstration, very broad theme, march on Washington for jobs and freedom. And I think it was a highwater mark for that kind of effort.
O'BRIEN: A success, then, across the board. And yet when you look at the politics to come out of that march has sort of turned more confrontational.
GREENFIELD: Well, in fact, for a time, everyone thought this multiracial, inclusive theme would work. But even at the time of the march, King and other veteran civil rights workers were under pressure from a much more militant kind of black politics and culture. There was Malcolm X, the spokesman for black Muslims, arguing that whites were simply not to be trusted. Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee got the phrase "nonviolence" out of their name; they didn't want it.
And within a year and a half of that march, the Vietnam War escalated, and I think that drove a wedge between liberals. Some said, look, civil rights is still the issue, don't protest the war, we've got a friend Lyndon Johnson in the White House. Others said the first priority was to stop the war, so that really split that coalition.
O'BRIEN: You say in addition to that there were some unintended political consequences that came out of this march. What do you mean?
GREENFIELD: Yes, and I think that's something really important. It's very hard to remember this, but back in the early '60s the black vote in the United States was very much up for grabs. Eisenhower had done well with it. Nixon in 1960 had competed for it. Liberal and moderate Republicans in Congress often pointed to southern Democrats who were mostly segregationists as the obstacle.
But after King's march and Kennedy's death that November, President Johnson swung all the might of the White House behind two civil rights bills, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Meanwhile, the 1964 Republican nominee Barry Goldwater opposed those laws, and the consequences were, first the black vote became solidly Democratic to this day. And second, many Southern whites were pushed away from the Democratic party. You had George Wallace, even in 1964, ran in three primaries outside the South and did pretty well. That same year Senator Strom Thurmond left the Democratic Party for the Republicans, the first of many. So the very success of the civil rights movement in the South, at least, led to a now-dominant Republican Party.
O'BRIEN: In the time since that speech, there have been about 20 zillion political marches and speeches, and you say there are important lessons that people should take from that march and apply to their own.
GREENFIELD: Well, it seems to me, and this is no original insight on my part, but it's true I think that King's great insight was to link his cause with a message of patriotism. His revolutionary rhetoric literally came from the American Revolution. The first part of that famous speech quotes from the Declaration of Independence. So what King was saying was, if you mean what you say about American ideals, this discrimination has to stop.
I think later movements, led by members, some of them seem to be saying that the whole American system was corrupt, hypocritical and malevolent. That pretty much is a guarantee you're not going to succeed. By putting a protest march into the frame of this is what America should mean, I think it's in a political and strategic sense, that's what a lot of later movements were missing. O'BRIEN: Do you remember that day today as clearly as you did back then?
GREENFIELD: When I think of that old man on the stoop weeping and chanting, overcome by emotion, it's 40 years ago, and it moves me literally to this day and this moment. I will never forget it, and never forget the hair standing up on the back of my neck as king started to speak. You had the sense of, whoa, this is one for the history books.
O'BRIEN: Wow, what a remarkable day.
Jeff Greenfield, thanks, as always.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
