In April 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. sat in jail after his arrest for peacefully protesting segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. On scraps of paper passed to him by a sympathizer of the cause, he wrote, “freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”
On August 28 of that same year, King was free and speaking to 250,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. His speech that day—63 years ago today—became one of the most consequential pieces of rhetoric in human history, so famous that a sample of its most well-known line topped the Billboard charts of numerous European countries over forty years after the speech was given, remixed into a house DJ set.
“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.’”
Thousands of European festivalgoers bopped along to Bakermat’s tune and King’s voice decades after he gave his speech. King would, I imagine, be proud that his message carried that far and that long. The song is titled “One Day (Vandaag).” Is this one day King dreamt of forty years prior any closer now than it was then? Or does the fact that the dream still exists and inspires suffice?
And what means justify the achievement of that dream?
Charlotte Rubin is a Belgian human rights lawyer and writer based in New York. She holds a masters degree in Cultural Reporting and Criticism from NYU. She writes about identity, migration, language, law, culture, and the intersections between all of the above. Her work can be read in the Nation, the New Internationalist, and Strange Matters Mag, amongst others. Read more of her work on her substack.
A nation where people are treated as full and equal citizens regardless of race, where “black men and white men… join hands,” is far removed from reality today. Some might call this big a dream, this large an ideal, delusional. King would respond that to fall into such a trap of despair is not an option. Each of us has a personal responsibility to keep hoping, so that the collective dream continues to be. Without it, there is only revolution without actual progress.
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