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The conventional view about the speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. on 28th August 1963 is that its call for equal rights and justice ring out with the message of peace and non-violence. Key Phrases from the speech This is the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation Seared in the flames of withering injustice to end the long night of their captivity but 100 years later the Negro is still not free, sadly crippled by the shackles of inequality The Negro Finds himself an exile in his own land Now is not the time. to take of the Tranquilising drug of gradualism to make real the promises of democracy Now is the time! From the quicksands of racial injustice to the sunlit path of racial justice and the sold rock of brotherhood. This sweltering summer of Negros legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating 1963 is not an end but a beginning Free At last Thank God almighty Free at Last. Claiming the legacy of the American revolutions King was definitely was a radical not a moderate as so often described by left commentators. He was not a revolutionary socialist but was definitely an American social democrat who adopted the language of the American Revolution and its constitution (17761787) as well as Lincoln speeches in the US Civil War or the 2nd American Revolution. The dream speech is a call to arms explicitly calling for the completion of unfinished tasks of the US Civil War which had been fought to end slavery and emancipate the slaves as seen by these key points: I have a dream that one day this nation will 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 (QUOTES THE US CONSTITUTION of 1787) Even in the state of Mississippi sweltering in the heat of oppression be transformed into an oasis of justice My 4 little childrenwill grow up in a nation where they will be judged not but the colour of their skin but by the content of their character Right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will hold hands with little white boys and white girl and live in brotherhood (DIRECT REFERENCE TO DESEGREGATING SCHOOLS STRUGGLES) The rough places shall be made flat, (QUOTES BIBLE OLD TESTAMENT ON JESUS IN THE TEMPLE - HOW EVIL SYSTEMS WILL FALL) This stone of hope faith to struggle together go to jail together to pray together sweet land of liberty LET FREEDOM RING from every mountainside, let it ring. from every state and every city and every hamlet (TO THE TUNE OF GOD SAVE THE QUEEN! LET FREEDOM RING IS ANTHEM OF 1776 AMERICAN REVOLUTION)

What other key parts of the speech mean: social justice King always had an economic justice agenda citing the brutal inequalities in American society. He mentions Segregation (i.e. in the South) and Discrimination (meaning racial inequality in the North) Justice is repeated again and again both in the legal sense (freedom from police oppression) but also economically hence the reference to Negroes living in an Island of poverty amidst an ocean of wealth. His references to banking and bouncing cheques marked insufficient funds will have been recognised by many in the crowd at Lincoln Memorial. America has defaulted on its obligations America has given the Negro a bad cheque - we refuse to believe the bank of justice is bankrupt we promise to cash this cheque that gives us the riches of freedom and the security of justice The Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of wealth. What was the significance of a MARCH ON WASHINGTON? Three previous civil rights Marches though much smaller had taken place in 1957, 1958 and 1960 to desegregate schools bit the phrase was originally associated with white supremacists. White Marches on Washington had definite menace the largest previous having been the Ku Klan Klan rally of 30,000 in 1925! About 10,000 white war veterans and about 8000 Suffragettes had also marched on DC in those years. So the threat of 10,000, 50,000 or even 100,000 Black people in Washington D.C. was scary for the ruling class in America and for the southern white racist establishment. AFL-CIO Vice President and black union leader A Philip Randolph had originally intended to March on Washington in 1941 in protest at the segregation & exclusion of Black workers from war industries. He did not have to march because President FD Roosevelt granted executive order 7708 the first meaningful US anti-racist legislation prohibition segregation and discrimination in war industries. Kings call for the March on Washington was therefore deliberately incendiary and antisystem despite the Kennedy brothers attempts to control the movement. That is why rightwingers erected billboards across the South showing Dr. King and Rosa Parks attending the Highlander Folk School in 1957. To the white power structure, integration was a "Communist plot" against the "Southern way of life" therefore, anyone attending an integrated event was by definition a "Communist." What the Civil rights movement was & how it responded Initially Black middle-class and church led mass lobby organisations arguing for legalbased reforms NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People) formed by WEB Du Bois CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) sometimes supported by liberal Democrats in the North and the trade unions in particular A Phillip Randolphs Brotherhood of porters and sleeping car attendants. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference was formed 1957 out of the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott struggle bringing Martin Luther King (a Progressive Baptist minister) to prominence. SCLC was formed initially by 30 or so groups but by the time of MLK in Birmingham Jail 1963 only 80 or so organisational churches joined as members it was not a mass organisation. The vast majority of Black churches and leaders stood aloof from the Civil rights movement which was seen as too radical and too political for church-

leaders looking to their spiritual mission not active politics. That is until SCLC started to succeed in building a movement challenging segregation. King however thought differently and was prepared to lobby political leaders in a dual strategy of moral suasion (i.e. convincing the authorities to concede civil rights under the law) but also of mobilising mass Non-Violent Direct Action. MLK himself said in 1963 that being arrested in Montgomery in 1955 quickly cured him of expecting rulers to give up civil rights without a fight. Civil Rights Movement tactics & strategy The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was born in 1960 from a spontaneous outbreak of sit-in protests to desegregate lunch-counters, cafes and shops starts at Gainesville and at Greensboro North Carolina with the first protest with 4 Black students refusing to move when not served. By Day 2, 13 black students, by day 3, 50 black students and 3 white students who show solidarity. Spreading to 30 locations across 17 states between April and June 1960, it demonstrated two realities: 1) that radical direct action by the masses achieves results and 2) that Black and White could unite and fight together for equal rights. SNCC was formed to link these spontaneous student struggles but quickly became a vanguard of fulltime activist militant students as local mass action quickly died down and was hard to sustain. By 1961 it sent full time Field Workers into the rural South to organise desegregation of Greyhound bus stations, lunch counters and win Voter registrations of Black voters. Dr Ella Baker the full-timer at the SCLC helped set up SNCC but vigorously defended its autonomy from SCLC even though King was keynote speaker there and his non-violence message dominated the founding conference. SNCC did not invent sit-ins (CORE had done this in the 1930s and 1940s but not generalised it as a nationwide tactic) but SNCC were the first to have a deliberate strategy of generalised confrontation with the racist authorities in the South, intending to get arrested, clogging up their jails by mobilising mass numbers of Field workers student volunteers (Black and White). The legacy of King Unfulfilled Equality still not achieved despite having an African American President serving his second term. The US is still a brutally racist, unequal and unjust society. Trayvon Martins death in 2013 shows President Obamas record little better than the Kennedys on Race. Influence of Civil rights movement today in Britain has been profound from the in the Stephen Lawrence campaign in the 1990s, to the United Families and Friends Campaigns for justice including those for Mark Duggan, Christopher Alder, Azelle Rodney, Roger Sylvester and Smiley Culture Impact of Direct Action and Non-violence as key influence The form of the United Front against Racism & Fascism very much shaped by the model of the US Civil rights movement an alliance of trade unions, community groups, activists and church leaders. Ethnic Minority Civic Congress Scotland and other anti-racism groups are modelled on the civil rights movement Tensions between calls for direct action protests and lobbying politicians for change are present in all anti-racism struggles in Scotland and Britain today. King showed that without the threat of revolt reforms are never conceded.

Violence & Non-violence Its an irony that King had armed bodyguards, many Black organisations used self-defence (sometimes armed!) to carry struggle forward. Although Kings radicalism is carefully coded to avoid misquotation, its meaning was clear to civil rights activists and the wider masses who heard it: Theyll have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual - There shall neither rest or tranquillity the whirlwind of revolt will continue to shake our foundations (THREAT OF AFRICAN AMERICAN REVOLT AGAINST THE SYSTEM IS NECESSARY TO MAKE THE ESTABLISHMENT CONCEDE REFORMS) Let us not satisfy our lust for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred (FIGHT RACIAL HATRED WITH LOVE & SOLIDARITY) Let us conduct our struggle not degenerate into physical force the marvellous new militancy that has engulfed the Negro community, many of our white brothers have come to realisation that their destiny is tied to our destiny their freedom is inextricably linked to our freedom (NON-VIOLENT DIRECT ACTION WILL UNITE BLACK AND WHITE) We can never be satisfied with Mobility from a smaller ghetto to a larger ghetto, robbed of our dignity where the Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and the Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote (ADVANCES FOR A SMALL BLACK ELITE IS NOT ENOUGH THE BLACK MASSES MUST BENEFIT) Staggered by creative suffering, that suffering is redemptive go back to Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and to our ghettos of the northern cities (SHOW THE OPPRESSORS AS VIOLENT AND UNCIVILISED - NOT OURSELVES) King was a radical social democrat who wanted a public service-based mixed economy, with strong state intervention and taxation of the wealthy, and who opposed the waste of life and resources on the Vietnam War. But he was full of the fierce urgency of now saying: This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilising drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood Today with such a call not to arms but to radical grassroots activism to confront the state and exposing its hypocrisy over its false promises of democracy, King would certainly be considered a left wing extremist - well to the left of Obama, and most European Socialist and Labour Parties. The promise of I Have a Dream was not the homage to individualistic advancement at the expense of the masses that it has historically been misrepresented as. It is a vision of true equality - the goal of economic AND social justice based on human dignity and collective action. No Justice No Peace comes to us as a slogan used in the civil rights movement and from the real Kings Speech! It is as much Martin Luther Kings cry as it is Malcolm Xs and we will go on hearing it until the Mark Duggan, Trayvon Martin and countless others finally get justice.