In August 1963, I covered the Civil Rights March in Washington, DC for the Antioch College paper, made easier because authorized credentials were issued by a man whose daughter was a classmate. Our reporting team had complete access to everyone and everything, including a pre-event party of the leadership where we found Dr King and Malcolm X in private conversation. The March on Washington by perhaps 2,50,000 people demanding equal rights made a lasting impression. March organisers were worried about speeches too incendiary for their sense of the event’s purpose and demanded a preview version of everyone’s speech.
Dr Martin Luther King was the last speaker and a printed handout was considerably shorter than his speech. In watching the video, you can see where he stopped checking his text and went into preacher mode:
“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. I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”
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There is a personal backstory worth retelling. We—three reporter-photographers—needed to process our film and make prints that Wednesday night so it could be flown back to Yellow Springs, Ohio for the Friday morning edition of the paper. Because a fellow student had a coop job at the Alexandria Gazette newspaper in a Washington suburb, she arranged for us to use their darkroom that night. We left it as neat and clean as we found it. The irony was that the Gazette was a segregationist newspaper and would not have let is in if it knew what we were doing.
—Kenneth Tiven
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