Time has blurred the edges of 84-year-old Myra Alexander’s memory. Recollections come in spurts. And other thoughts are gone forever.
But some things you never forget. Like growing up black and poor in a sparsely integrated neighborhood in Chicago during World War I. Or daily fights with white kids who used “nigger” as a weapon.
More than anything, however, Alexander remembers the sense of hope she felt in seeing her rage so calmly articulated by Martin Luther King Jr.
“He was a truthful man,” the retired Chicago Board of Education janitor said as she sat in her South Side apartment. “He told the truth about the condition of black people in America.
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“We were kept out of the best schools, the best jobs. It seemed like God had blessed the segregationists. Black people had segregation; white people had freedom. Now we’re free too. But we did it ourselves.”
And if African-Americans had to snatch freedom for themselves, King was there to lead the way.
“I got hope when Martin Luther King spoke,” she said. “Hope for freedom. Hope for the end of segregation. He was God-sent.”
When Alexander heard about the march on Washington planned for Aug. 28, 1963, there was no question about missing it. Of course she would go. Of course.
And so, on an overcast summer day, Alexander packed a box lunch, kissed her postal worker husband goodbye, grabbed her two 3-year-old granddaughters by the hand and boarded a plane to Washington.
King stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial, and his voice echoed over the reflecting pool to the multitude of listeners who sat in rapt attention. Alexander leaned over and shushed her grandchildren as they fidgeted on the grass.
“Gonny said, `Listen, that’s Martin Luther King speaking. This is your history,’ ” remembered Alexander’s granddaughter, Melanie Blocker Reed, 33, a pharmaceutical sales representative.
“The way she said it, the way she looked at us, made us listen and say, `OK.’ I didn’t understand what he was saying, but I had this feeling that something was going on, and it was something great.”
The specifics of King’s speech elude Alexander today. But, “I remember that it did something here,” she said, touching her heart. “It couldn’t help but move you, yes indeed. I thought it was another step to our freedom.”
Back home, Alexander continued to fight for that freedom, in her home and in the streets. African-American history books-and her feet-were her weapons of choice. She taught her grandchildren to be proud of their African heritage. You are black, she told them, not Negro.
And she marched. She was there in 1964 when King spoke at Soldier Field. She was there in 1966 when he was struck by a rock in Marquette Park.
She also was there for King’s funeral.
“I tell you, it was a sad time,” the grandmother of 13 said, shaking her head mournfully. “I was devastated. I said, `What are we going to do without our leader?’ “
“King’s dream is not alive today like he would have wanted,” said Alexander, who put three of her seven children through college. “White people still don’t want to see us as equals. Slavery made us the most hated people in the world.”
`We are making history’
A festive spirit captured the folks riding the Freedom Trains from Chicago to Washington that August.
After the months of campaigning, squabbles and sleepless nights that went into planning the march, excitement had reached a fever pitch.
People paraded onto the train singing. Blacks and whites sat together. Ninety-year-olds who had lived out their lifetimes stepped proudly onto the train.
As Timuel Black’s then-9-year-old son, Tim Jr., told author Studs Terkel that day, “We are making history.”
The sense of history was heightened when they got off the train in Washington and were greeted by the first swell of marchers.
“The sight of this mass of humanity was beautiful,” said Timuel Black, now 74, who at the time was a Hyde Park high school history teacher and co-chairman of the Chicago branch of the March on Washington planning committee.
“We were going forward with a hope and a dream. And we were already part of success.”
`An Eden here on earth’
Everyone talks about how hot it was that day. But for a 36-year-old rabbi from Highland Park, the heat brought with it an epiphany.
Robert Marx stood in the crowd, listening to King describe his dream. A few feet away, an elderly African-American man collapsed in the heat.
When Marx went to help him, the man, a Southerner, said, “I’ve lived in this country for 75 years. But today, I became an American.”
“That’s what led me to the civil rights movement,” said the rabbi, now 66. “Being aware that black people did not feel a part of this country. I had to come to know what it meant, to feel you could live in a country and not have the same rights as other people.”
At the time, Marx was no stranger to the struggle for civil rights. He already was a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. And, as director of the Inter-Religious Council on Urban Affairs, he’d worked to promote racial justice in Chicago.
But the march-and the old man-sparked a certain fervor in Marx. When he returned home, he created the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs, a community organization designed to fight racial inequities by forging alliances with other community groups. Today, the council has a staff of about 20 that deals with everything from soup kitchens to slum lords to single-room occupancy hotels.
“I wanted to create an Eden right here on earth,” said Marx, who has retired from the council and now spends most of his time as rabbi of the Hakafa Congregation in Glencoe.
These days, however, the notion of an earthly paradise seems a bit more remote.
“We have a black middle class that’s better off and we have seen some definite improvements and opportunities,” Marx said. “But over the past decade, the rich have grown richer and the poor have grown more desperate. I haven’t lost hope, but there’s so much to be done.”
`Everybody was floating’
“Expectations were high,” said Rev. Elmer Fowler as he rocked back and forth in his Little Rock, Ark., office. “And when Mahalia Jackson sang and Martin spoke, everybody was floating on air.
“You felt like you could walk on water without sinking,” he said with an ear-to-ear grin.
Friendly service and a good seat in a restaurant still were a dream for blacks in the South, even in larger cities like Memphis and Atlanta. The threat of lynching had not disappeared in many of the small cities and backwoods areas.
Things have been slow to change, Fowler said.
“You still have white folks who will leave a whole city, the banks, churches, supermarkets, neighborhoods, the whole thing before they will live with black folks,” said the recently retired Baptist minister.
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“That speech was a guiding light,” he said. “It melted a lot of the hatred among many of the whites, and it gave courage to blacks that they could fight and that they could be more than just janitors. They were humans with rights and a purpose and something to fight for, and that something was and still is freedom.”
`I wished we’d been there’
In 1963, Pearl Cleage was a 14-year-old obsessed with the typical activities of the average teenager: boys and hanging out past curfew.
Her other activities-picketing the corner grocery, meeting Malcolm X and campaigning for militant black politicians-weren’t so typical.
“I was fussing at everything,” Cleage recalled with a laugh. “People regarded me as my father’s daughter. My friends understood the legacy, the family that I was a part of.”
As the daughter of a black nationalist minister, Cleage grew up in a Detroit home overflowing with books, cutting-edge writers and political debates. In her household, black self-determination, rather than integration, was the goal.
Martin Luther King Jr. may have seemed radical to many middle Americans, but to the Cleage family, he was decidedly right-of-center.
Still, it was hard not to get caught up in the excitement of the civil rights event of the decade. The day before the march, Cleage traveled with her family to Ann Arbor, Mich., where many of the march speakers were giving a preview of their scheduled speeches.
The next day, her extended family clustered around the television set in their Idlewild summer home and watched King preach about the dream.
“In spite of the fact our politics weren’t the same as Martin Luther King’s, I was excited,” said Cleage, 44. “I was exhilarated. I wished we had been there. It really made you feel like if all these black folks could keep focused, then maybe we could make a change. It made me feel optimistic, like we could win.”
Now, however, she is not so sure that African-Americans will win. Life, she said, is a lot more complicated. Sure, there are plenty of black politicians in office, but where are the jobs? AIDS, drugs, poverty and violence continue to destroy the African-American community. She sees no national black leader-even someone with whom she can agree to disagree.
“I’m more pessimistic than I have ever been in my life,” said Cleage, an author and newspaper columnist who teaches playwriting at Spelman College in Atlanta. “Which is why I’m writing and trying to talk to people, to tell them, `Let’s pick up the pace.’ If we don’t, we’re doomed. We’ve got to do something and we’ve got to do something real fast.”
`We were all unified’
Covered by a large placard proclaiming, “Jobs For All: Equal Employment,” Carl Schier, an international representative for the United Auto Workers union, stood on the grass in the mall that August day. All around him there was a haunting silence.
“You could hear a pin drop as King spoke,” he said.
Shier, who is white, had ridden the train from Chicago to Washington with 400 other UAW members armed with dozens of placards and lots of enthusiasm.
“It made no difference what you were because we were all unified by a call for peace, harmony and humanity,” said Shier, now 75.
“When you looked around you felt like this is what the world is supposed to be . . . a place where we could truly be judged by what we do and what we are rather than our ethnicity or color.”
Shier, now chairman of the UAW Local 6 Retired Workers Chapter of Navistar International in Melrose Park, believes that the speech did help to bring about important civil rights legislation and open the eyes of the nation to the evil of segregation. But King’s words combined with the scenes around him showed Shier that no matter what had been done to bring the country together, it could always be better.
“The tragedy is the society we had hoped would come about as a result of that speech still has not materialized,” he said.
`We Shall Overcome’
“King said, `Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, I’m free at last,’ ” said Addie Wyatt, 69, co-pastor of Vernon Baptist Church and one of the Chicago coordinators for the 1963 march on Washington.
“But that time is not now. I really thought by 1993, we’d be singing `We Have Overcome.’ But we’re still singing `We Shall Overcome.’ “
Addie Wyatt first met King in 1956, when he came to Chicago to work with the United Packinghouse Workers Union, of which she was a low-ranking leader. It was the beginning of a 12-year friendship.
The last time Wyatt saw King was in 1968, when a group of civil rights leaders were returning from a trip to Jamaica. He kissed her on the cheek, shook hands with her husband, Claude, and promised they’d meet again soon in Chicago. The struggle continues, he said.
A few weeks later, a bullet turned the man into a martyr.
King is dead, but the movement didn’t die with him, according to Wyatt: They got Harold Washington elected, didn’t they? It just goes to show what black folks can accomplish when they’re unified.
Still, as King said, the struggle continues.
But this time, the war is being waged on the economic front.
“We used to have to ride on the back of the bus,” Wyatt said. “Now we can ride on the front of the bus. But you need the money to be able to ride at all.”
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Next: Realizing the dream.