FOR FOUR hours yesterday, the pendulum swung back and forth, from dismay at America’s economic inequality to pride in the progress towards racial equality. Several speakers – including two of Martin Luther King jnr’s children – gave the Occupy Wall Street protesters their stamp of approval. President Barack Obama drew a parallel between Dr King’s struggle and his own.
Tens of thousands of Americans had gathered in the crisp morning air, between the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials, to dedicate the Martin Luther King jnr memorial. The majority were black, but many white people had joined them. A Latino in the crowd wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “I am part of Dr King’s dream too” in Spanish.
It took 28 years for the project created by the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, to which Dr King belonged, to be realised. There were problems with funding, disagreements over the choice of a Chinese sculptor. And at the last minute, when the monument was to have been inaugurated on the 48th anniversary of Dr King’s “I have a dream” speech on August 28th, Hurricane Irene forced a postponement.
Dr King’s daughter Bernice reminded the throng that when he was assassinated in 1968, her father was “on the verge of organising a poor people’s march to come and occupy Washington”.
His son, Martin Luther King III, said: “The young people of the Occupy movement all over this country are looking for justice for working class people who are barely making it, justice for middle class people who are unable to pay their mortgages, justice for young people who graduate from college burdened by student loans they cannot pay.”
Rev Jesse Jackson, who described himself as “part of Dr King’s corps of disciples”, said “the occupiers of Wall Street are the global children of Dr King’s campaign for the poor.”
Economic determinism may have overtaken racial prejudice as a barrier to equality in America, but the mood in the crowd was nonetheless upbeat.
Lucretia Wilson (63), a retired circuit-maker for the Verizon telecommunications company, was a young adult at the height of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s.
“I feel very fortunate to have lived through it,” she said. “There was a lot of hardship and social change and the [Vietnam] war was horrible . . . But the music was phenomenal. We did the hippie free love movement . . . This is a real good time to be alive too. This is a social revolution going on. It’s electronic, fast and solid; it just erupts. The Wall Street demonstrators are going to cause a change that is so badly needed.”
The choir sang Glory, glory hallelujahas President Obama and his wife and daughters inspected the 30-foot-high statue of Dr King. I sat beside Rosie Johnson (77), who had travelled from Louisiana for the dedication. "When I grew up, I was working for a white family," she told me. "When I took the children on the bus, I couldn't sit with them. The family went on a fishing trip to a lake. They had to leave because I was with them. You see why I'm here? To celebrate."
“Four more years. Four more years,” the crowd chanted as President Obama walked to the podium. “We forget now, but during his life, Dr King wasn’t always considered a unifying figure,” the president said. “Even after rising to prominence, even after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Dr King was vilified by many, denounced as . . . a communist and a radical.”
Everyone understood that President Obama was also talking about himself. “He was even attacked by his own people,” the president continued, “by those who felt he was going too fast or those who felt he was going too slow.”
He wanted his daughters to know of Dr King’s setbacks, doubts and flaws, as well as his strength. The thing that made Dr King “so quintessentially American” was that “for all the hardships we’ve endured, for all our sometimes tragic history, ours is a story of optimism and achievement and constant striving that is unique upon this Earth.”
The choir sang We Shall Overcome. On stage, the Kings, Obamas and Bidens swayed to the music and sang along. The African-American woman beside me clasped my hand and swayed and sang too. For a moment, Dr King's "beloved community" seemed to have come true.