Most everyone has heard Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. But most don’t know the people places and events that inspired the words of his eloquent and powerful address.
Welcome to Tracing the Path
The tune to the song “America” has no name. It’s the tune of England’s national anthem, God Save the Queen, and is used by 40 other countries in some patriotic way. In 1831, it found life in the United States.
Lowell Mason, a famed organist and composer, had discovered the lucrative business of selling sheet music, working with him on creating books of new music for schools and churches to play was Samuel Francis Smith.
One day, Lowell brought him a pile of music he’d collected in Europe and asked Samuel to go through it and find tunes they could pen new lyrics to. Obviously, this was prior to any copyright or public domain issues that would occur today.
Samuel found the tune which it is believed he had not heard before and wrote out new lyrics that began:
“My country tis of thee
sweet land of liberty
of thee I sing.”
Lowell thought schoolchildren would love this patriotic song, and debuted it at a 4th of July children’s celebration in Boston in 1831. The song was well received and grew in popularity very quickly. The song’s lyrics didn’t resonate with everyone, however. Samuel Francis Smith’s America wasn’t everyone’s America in 1832.
But by 1841 the entire country had heard the song one way or another.
1841 was also the year abolitionist Frederick Douglass gave his first recorded speech at an anti-slavery meeting in Hingham, Massachusetts. The Hingham Group was just one of 1,350 anti-slavery chapters nationwide. Over 250,000 people were part of the anti-slavery movement, including notables such as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and poet John Greenleaf Whittier.
The group circulated newsletters had meetings and held rallies. The Hingham Group published a monthly paper called “The Liberator” and sold a book of anti-slavery music, including their own rendition of America:
“My country tis of thee
strong hold of slavery
of thee I sing.”
Harvey Buel-Spelman had been active in anti-slavery groups of Massachusetts before relocating to Ohio, where he became part of the Underground Railroad and part of the anti-slavery movement there. He and his wife were also strong members of the church, which is how they raised their daughter, Laura.
Having seen her mother work hard at the church and in the movement, Laura Spelman decided to go to Folsom Mercantile College in Cleveland to further her accounting skills. It is there she met her future husband, fellow accounting student, John D. Rockefeller.
John was getting his accounting degree to move up at the produce firm where he had started as a teenager. After getting his degree and returning, John’s job involved calculating transportation costs and negotiating prices and collecting debts.
When the Civil War broke out, together John and Laura started their own business, getting the US government the food and supplies they would need for the war, which led them to getting into the oil business and thus a new company called Standard Oil.
Laura and John remained committed to their faith and both to their abolitionist movement. A preacher once encouraged John to make as much money as possible, so he could give it all away to the things he was most passionate about. To that end, John D. Rockefeller and Laura Spelman both worked very hard.
Because of their faith and views of America, they both voted for Lincoln in the 1860 election. Lincoln didn’t agree with slavery on ethical or moral grounds either. In the Lincoln-Douglas Debates leading up to the election, he made his position clear,
“Point to the most important words in the Declaration. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.”
And then he asked,
“If there is a man who says these words, do not mean the Negro, why not? If the Declaration is not the truth, let us get the statute book and tear it out. If it is true, then we must stand firmly by it.”
After the election, his position on slavery would strengthen as the Civil War began to tear the country apart, and so after the victory at Antietam, Lincoln declared that all enslaved people in the rebellious states were to be set free. This Emancipation Proclamation would go into effect on January 1st, 1863.
But America didn’t change overnight.
While the Proclamation seemed like the promise African Americans had waited generations to receive, it would become more of a starting point in a new uphill battle.
By itself, the Proclamation merely outlawed slavery in the Confederate States, and it encouraged former slaves to join the Union military and help in the fight. It would take another two years in 1865 before a constitutional amendment would pass a abolishing slavery in every state. But even its language was a promise unfulfilled. It gave slaveholders a loophole to keep up their activities.
The Rockefeller Standard Oil had profited very well from the Civil War, thus they had already began investing their money in projects that helped provide opportunities to African Americans, as well as areas that would expand the Baptist Church.
By 1890, they had given millions of dollars to 34 different schools. One of those was the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary. The Rockefeller’s had paid off all the outstanding debt and finance construction of a larger building and exchanged for renaming it, Spelman College, after Laura’s family.
And then on a nearby land, they bought and created an all-male college, they named it Morehouse. Both Spelman and Morehouse have since produced many famous alumni. Spelman graduated Alice Walker, author of A Color Purple. And Morehouse has seen actors Spike Lee, Samuel L. Jackson and musician Thomas Dorsey. And activist, Martin Luther King Jr. would walk through its doors.
While their intentions may have been good in their own minds, some didn’t take kindly to white Americans financing institutions for black Americans. One of those was poet W.E.B. Du Bois.
W.E.B. Du Bois was born William Edward Burkhardt Du Bois, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1865. His family lived in a very small, free black population and had owned land for quite some time. William’s great grandfather had served in the Revolutionary War where he was given his freedom, and his grandfather on the other side had been a slave owner who had fathered several children with the slave women. One of those, mixed-race children, was his father.
In 1867 his parents married, but two years later, just after his birth, his father left, and his mother died, leaving William to be raised by friends, neighbors, and the church. He shined through the darkness, though, and grew up excelling in school, graduating from both Fisk University in Nashville and Harvard.
Fisk was his first experience with deep-rooted Southern racism. There he developed a feeling of being viewed as subhuman. After Harvard, he received a fellowship to study at the University of Berlin, where he experienced the exact opposite. It was Germany where he developed his clearest ideas of America. He said,
Fisk University Marker.
“I found myself on the outside of the American world looking in. And here they did not pause to regard me as a curiosity or something subhuman. I was just a man.”
Upon returning to America he worked in Philadelphia and could see from his European experience that the key to a good society was not segregation, but complete integration. He said the blacks of the South needed the right to vote, the right to education, the right to be treated equally, the right to decent housing.
In 1903 he published his thoughts in a book called “The Souls of Black Folk” under his pen name, W.E.B. DuBois which famously concluded: “The Problem of the 20th Century is the Problem of the Color Line.”
It was The Souls of Black Folk that convinced a young A. Philip Randolph that social equality was the most important thing to fight for. At the time, A. Philip Randolph was attempting to become an actor in New York City, but really was a transplant from Florida. Florida didn’t have the opportunities he was looking for, however.
While acting, he and a friend opened an employment office in Harlem to provide job training for Southern migrants. That led him to getting involved with organizing elevator operators into a union. And being one of the few people with any experience putting together a union, he was elected president of the National Brotherhood Workers of America, and then president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first union for employees of the Pullman Corporation.
The Pullman Corporation was the largest employer of African Americans. As the railroads had expanded drastically in the early 20th century, the railroads offered relatively good employment, but in poor working conditions. Philip was able to enroll 51% of the porters, and after successfully lobbying the government for changes, the Railway Labor Act of 1934 was passed. And from that, he negotiated a $2 million pay raise for the poorest. From his work, A. Philip Randolph emerged as one of the most visible spokespeople for African-American civil rights.
The rising conflict in Europe helped end the Depression during the 1930s in America. The booming defense industry created new jobs for whites, leaving black workers disenfranchised again. A. Philip Randolph and friend, Bayard Rustin, proposed a march on Washington to protest racial discrimination in the war industries and desegregation of the military.
Chapters started to organize and Philip sent word to the President that they had mobilized over 50,000 people to march just as the US was entering the war. On June 25th, 1941, Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, which prohibited discrimination in the defense industry. It also set up the Fair Employment Practices Commission to promote equal opportunity in the US.
And so the march was called off.
But the order did nothing to end segregation in the military. So a few years later in 1947, Philip threatened a march on Washington again, spurring this time President Truman to issue executive order 9981, abolishing discrimination in the armed forces.
That brings us to the second third hero of our story. Samuel Francis Smith, John and Laura Rockefeller, Abraham Lincoln, W.E.B. Du Bois, an A. Philip Randolph, are all critical parts of the story.
Now we make our way to the moment all these pieces come together.
We start back in 1899 with Thomas Dorsey. Thomas grew up in rural Georgia in a very religious household, where music was the forefront. Thomas’ dad was a gospel musician who incidentally was one of the first graduates of Morehouse College. But Thomas gained most of his musical experience, playing the blues at Speakeasys in juke joints.
Looking for bigger and better opportunities, he headed to Chicago, where the jazz and blues were really heating up. At first he found a home composing and arranging jazz tunes and gained a bit of fame accompanying blues’ legend Ma Rainey.
But the gospel music of the South was tugging on his heartstrings.
In 1928, he had a home run with his blues song, “Tight Like That”, selling more than seven million albums. His success with the blues, all but put Gospel music in the background. That is, until the 1930 National Baptist Convention.
Their gospel singer, William A. Ford, sang Dorsey’s song, “If You See My Saviour,” during a morning session, and then was asked to sing it two more times, resulting in Thomas Dorsey selling 4,000 print copies of his song.
Inspired by the moment, Dorsey formed a gospel choir at a church in Chicago. Their rousing renditions had the pastor marching up and down the aisles, Dorsey standing at the piano playing and the congregation dancing between the pews. When the pastor of Pilgrim Baptist saw what the music was doing to the congregation, he hired Dorsey, as his musical director, allowing him to dedicate all his time to gospel music.
Just as his rousing gospel style started to catch on, his wife and first born son would pass away during childbirth. And in his grief, he wrote his now most famous composition, “Take my hand, precious Lord.”
Across the street, from Pilgrim Baptist was a beauty salon run by a young businesswoman who was looking to make a career for herself as a gospel singer. The salon became a social hub for the neighborhood. And incidentally, A. Philip Randolph had organized a chapter of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Carporters at Pilgrim Church as well because of this social hub.
The owner of the salon, Mahalia, had an amazing voice which Dorsey loved. He would often call and have her sing and demonstrate his songs on sales calls. As her local fame grew, he proposed a series of performances to showcase her voice and his music. From that, Mahalia Jackson would start to gain worldwide fame.
One of their performances was at the Golden Gate Ballroom in Harlem, where a representative from Apollo Records heard her and signed her to a full record deal. Her song “Move on Up a Little Higher” would reach a number two spot on the Billboard charts just four years later.
Mahalia’ss rising fame would take her to Carnegie Hall, Royal Albert Hall, singing for U.S. presidents, her own CBS Radio Show, and on Ed Sullivan. When she played Orchestra Hall, she was introduced by her favorite poet, Langston Hughes.
Langston Hughes was not only a famous poet, but his poem Harlem had inspired Lorraine Hansberry to write the play “Raisin in the Sun” which also became the first award-winning play by an African-American playwright on Broadway. And the play put one of Mahalia’s songs “We Shall Overcome” front and center.
In 1956 Mahalia sang at the National Baptist Convention, and that is where she met, Martin Luther King, Jr.
They became fast friends, and Mahalia was on board to help him achieve his dreams in the Civil Rights Movement.
She even traveled to Montgomery, Alabama, to sing in support of the famous Montgomery bus boycott. And this is where the pieces of the puzzle began to come together.
The 1955 Montgomery bus boycott was the living breathing thing W.E.B. Du Bois was talking about. When he said the trouble of the 20th century would be the color line. In fact, when Du Bois’ book, The Souls of Black Folk, was reprinted in 1961, Saunders Redding, the first African-American professor at an Ivy League school, wrote the introduction, and in it he said, “The boycott of the buses in Montgomery had many routes, but none were more important than this little book of essays.”
The bus boycott was close to Mahalia’s heart. When she had performed in the South, she knew they’d be sleeping in their cars as it wasn’t easy to find hotels that allowed African Americans. In Montgomery, African Americans weren’t even allowed to sit near white people.
So in 1955, when a series of people were arrested for not giving up their seats for whites, the NAACP and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Carporters decided it was time to act. They thought it was time for a bus boycott and decided to create an organization to head the effort.
Martin Luther King Jr. was chosen to lead the movement.
Of those arrested, they felt Rosa Parks would elicit the most sympathy, and thus her trial date was chosen as the boycott start date. The boycott was to be just for one day, with the goal of getting the attention of the city of Montgomery, with the hope of achieving a more respectful situation in the public bussing system.
Everyone, the leaders of the city and the community were surprised by the level of participation they had achieved that day. Almost no one took the bus. That night, Martin Luther King held a rally, asking for the boycott to continue, with the attendees enthusiastically agreeing.
The community came together and created a carpool of more than 800 cars. As the protest went on, word went out within the civil rights community that money would be needed to keep it going. Not only were bicycles needed, but many of the carpool participants needed gas and repair money.
Harry Belafonte, Mahalia Jackson, and Aretha Franklin, among others, all put on performances to raise money. Jackie Robinson invited Jazz artists to put on concerts at his home. Langston Hughes wrote the poem “Brotherly Love,” in honor of the boycott and to bring attention to it. Martin Luther King was already a fan of Hughes. In fact earlier that year, he’d recited his poem “Mother to Son” to his wife for her first Mother’s Day.
While it started on December 5th, the boycott was still going on the following August. Martin Luther King would give a speech the day after the Democratic National Convention, where he called on African-Americans everywhere to use peaceful protests and boycotts to advance their cause.
And in it, he paid subtle homage to Langston Hughes by ending his speech with a rewrite of his poem “I Dream a World.”
A world I dream were black or white
whatever race you be
will share the bounties of the earth
and every man is free.
A little precursor to a bigger speech that was coming.
Then 382 days after it began, the Supreme Court would rule on their case. They ruled it was unconstitutional to have segregate public buses. On December 20, 1956, the Civil Rights Movement progressed one more step, and the citizens of Montgomery began using the buses again.
Martin Luther King would now be flanked by a close-knit group of loyal advisors, A. Philip Randolph, Byard Rustin, Ralph Abernathy, Harry Belafonte, Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King, Stanley Levinson, Clarence Jones, and Mahalia Jackson.
With the Supreme Court decision under their belt, the movement decided Martin needed to be seen on a world stage. So they sent him to the independent ceremony in the country of Ghana.
They had seen parallels between what Ghana had achieved gaining independence from European colonialism and the struggle against racism in the U.S. Martin would find out later that W.E.B. Du Bois planned to attend, but the U.S. government put a hold on his passport, preventing it.
That night in Ghana, at the independent celebration, Martin Luther King witnessed the lowering of the British Union Jack flag and the raising of the Ghana Flag. He was overtaken with joy and tears, seeing half a million people, elated, singing an old spiritual, “free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty we are free at last.”
The bus boycott did more than just move the cause of civil rights forward legally. It inspired people everywhere to join the movement.