Martin Luther King Jr. Day is celebrated annually in the United States, close to the January 15 birthday of the late civil-rights leader. The national holiday took effect 40 years ago.
Yet the oration for which he is best remembered came on a different date — August 28, 1963 — and remains legendary as his “I Have a Dream” speech.
It occurred on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., late on a Sunday afternoon at the culmination of a daylong event that drew an estimated 200,000 people from throughout the United States to what was billed as “The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” to bolster President John F. Kennedy’s civil-rights legislation.
“It was like a pilgrimage to Jerusalem … maybe like Yom Kippur, when you feel holy all through yourself, inside and out,” Jerome Lipnick, a rabbi in Minneapolis, Minnesota, told the city’s American Jewish World newspaper of being at the march.
A minister and a son of a minister, King, a Baptist, delivered scores of impassioned speeches as the leader of Black Americans’ campaign to secure equal rights in the United States, including such fundamental acts as voting and such mundane ones as eating at any restaurant, lodging at any hotel and sipping from any public water fountain.
But King’s “I Have a Dream” speech broke through as “the first cultural event in which most white Americans witnessed a phenomenon of Black culture” that wasn’t centered on Black entertainers, Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a biographical trilogy on King, said in an interview for this article. “It was a patriotic picnic with Black people in starring roles.”
The speech’s resounding, concluding sentence mentioned Jews amongst King’s ideal scenario of Americans comprising “all of God’s children” linking hands in freedom.
A few moments earlier, King recited the verses of Isaiah 40:4–5, evoking the earthly preparations and corrections necessary for God’s glory to be revealed.
Typical for King, in the Washington speech “he put one foot in Scripture and one foot in the Constitution,” Branch said.
During his leadership years, King pronounced his solidarity with Jews and Israel. He grasped the resonance of an alliance between peoples with histories of enslavement and existential struggle. One of his closest Jewish allies in the civil-rights movement was Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.
“There’s probably no more prominent figure in American society of that era who was more openly Zionist,” Dumisani Washington, a Black Christian-Zionist leader, said of King. “The anti-Zionists on the left were frustrated by Dr. King because he was such a Zionist.”
In the early days of the international movement to attain freedom for Soviet Jews, King viewed it as a human-rights struggle for those he called “our Jewish brothers in the Soviet Union,” one in which apathy was not an option.
In an appearance before the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly in upstate New York on March 25, 1968, King was asked about anti-Jewish hatred and anti-Israel feelings among some Black Americans.
At the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil-rights organization that King led, “we have consistently condemned antisemitism,” he responded. “[F]or the Black man to be struggling for justice and then turn around and be antisemitic is not only a very irrational course but it is a very immoral course.”
Of the Jewish state, he said this that night: “We must stand with all of our might to protect Israel’s right to exist, its territorial integrity. I see Israel, and never mind saying it, as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land almost can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy. Peace for Israel means security, and that security must be a reality.”
On another occasion, King spoke with a moral clarity that’s needed today amidst the hatred directed against Jews and Israelis.
“When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking antisemitism,” he said.
That remark came in October 1967. King had planned to lead a large delegation of Black Americans, including gospel-singing star Mahalia Jackson, on a pilgrimage to Israel the following month. King would be preaching near the Sea of Galilee.
David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s former prime minister, had written to King on January 20, 1967, to congratulate him on the impending trip.
The visit “will encourage people of all races to revive the old tradition of making a pilgrimage to the Bible Lands,” Ben-Gurion wrote. “Your contribution of spiritual leadership to your people will definitely find its fulfillment in such a pilgrimage.”
King responded on May 9, writing that he had “great enthusiasm” for the trip, which ”will be a very meaningful and memorable experience for each participant.” As he spoke around the country about the upcoming pilgrimage, King wrote, “I have been gratified at the response I have received.”
The trip was postponed due to the Six-Day War and rescheduled for the fall of 1968. It never came about. King was assassinated on April 4, 10 days after his Rabbinical Assembly talk.
Picking up on King’s plan, Washington will in November be leading a weeklong pilgrimage to Israel for clergy, businesspeople, educators and students. To date, 500 Black Americans and Africans have registered. Washington said he hopes that 5,000 people join him in Israel in November 2027 on the 60th anniversary of King’s planned visit.
The itinerary for Washington’s group will include Jerusalem’s Martin Luther King Street and two forests in the Galilee, one planted in memory of King and a later one after the death of his widow, Coretta Scott King.
A ceremony was held in 1983 at the first forest to mark the 20th anniversary of the March on Washington. A diverse group of Israelis and Africans linked arms.
“If G-d had indeed allowed [King] to reach the mountaintop, to see the Promised Land,” Wayne Perlmutter, invoking King’s prophetic speech the night before his death, wrote later that year in the Intermountain Jewish News, “perhaps he would have seen something like this.”
Writer-editor Hillel Kuttler may be reached at [email protected].
