Witnesses to King's dream see new hope

By Michael Powell

updated 12:36 a.m. ET Aug. 28, 2008

DENVER - She figured this dream for dead so many decades ago.

Dezie Woods-Jones plans to stand Thursday night with her California delegation in a stadium here and listen to Barack Obama, the first black major-party presidential nominee in the nation’s history, give his acceptance speech. Ms. Woods-Jones, now in her 60s, is one of a tiny handful of delegates who on the same day in 1963, Aug. 28, stood with hundreds of thousands at the March on Washington and heard a young minister, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., deliver his soaring “I Have a Dream” speech.

“I was young, naïve enough to think I would see that in 5, 10 years,” she said. “Then you see leaders killed, you see police brutality, residential segregation in cities. About 10 years ago I thought: I won’t see this. This is something for my grandchildren.”

She paused, her eyes now red-rimmed.

“What to say except, ‘Oh, hallelujah!’ ” she said. “We have a lot of work, a lot, but we are so much closer than I expected.”

These veterans of the March on Washington are the living connective tissue to the America of 1963, when the police in some cities and towns still beat blacks with truncheons, and the story of their journey is as complicated as race itself.

At least five veterans of that march traveled to Denver this week as Democratic delegates, among them Representative John Lewis of Georgia, who is the last man alive of the 10 who spoke that day at the Lincoln Memorial. This son of sharecroppers, who was almost beaten to death by police officers in Selma, Ala., when he marched with civil rights activists across a bridge, stood on a sun-splashed street in Denver and considered the distance traveled.

His bald head still bears near half-century-old scars.

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“We’ve had disappointments since then, but if someone told me I would be here,” Mr. Lewis said, shaking that head. “When people say nothing has changed, I feel like saying, ‘Come walk in my shoes.’ ”

Many veterans of the march will gather at televisions in their living rooms Thursday night, or sit with friends and old comrades and watch an event they would have considered impossible not just in 1963, but perhaps in 1983, or 1993. Theirs is often a cautious optimism; time has left them with a sense of the provisional nature of progress.

David R. Jones, now president of the Community Service Society in New York, recalled milling about in Washington in 1963, a 15-year-old there with classmates from a lefty school in Manhattan. Then Dr. King began to speak, and they fell quiet. “I never saw that kind of a speech,” Mr. Jones said.

He was transported. But the years ahead often cast a deep shadow. Mr. Jones, who is black, was beaten by the side of the road in Maine. He fought for decades to integrate middle-class housing developments and saw young whites wave watermelons at black marchers in Brooklyn. There were great victories, too, not least the election of dozens and dozens of black members of Congress, a few senators, and in his own city, Mayor David N. Dinkins. But he is left with a chary view of history’s march.

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“Obama doesn’t have all the burdens of my generation,” Mr. Jones said. “We have one foot in both eras. We’re still living out a lot of anger.”

The Rev. Walter E. Fauntroy can bubble with anger still; his 75 years have not dulled his outrage. He served as the District of Columbia’s delegate in the House in the 1970s and 1980s, and often raged at what he saw as the racism of denying Washington statehood and full voting rights.

Years earlier, as a 30-year-old, he was asked by Dr. King to coordinate the logistics for the March on Washington. Those were precarious days; just a week before, white segregationists had marched through Washington carrying signs reading “Martin Luther Coon go home.” When he traveled across the Potomac to Virginia, he rode in the back of the bus.

“People ask what has changed, and I say don’t trivialize the changes,” Mr. Fauntroy said. “I’m seeing the fruit of the changes that began in 1964. I was close to Bobby Kennedy. He said to me: ‘You know, America’s going to change. Forty years from now, a black man could achieve what my brother has achieved.’ ”

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