Being There: August 28, 1963
By Brother Stavros
Today. August 28, 2013,
I was listening to the commemorative speeches from the steps of the Lincoln
Memorial. Here in Cambridge it was hot, sunny, and muggy, and I was taken
quickly back to a similar day 50 years ago. Somewhere on the northwest side of
the reflection pool, close enough to see the speakers without field glasses, I
was packed in with co-workers from Georgetown University, where I had a summer
job.
My
aunts and uncles in DC, southern in culture and attitudes, warned me not to go:
“There’s gonna’ be big trouble.” But on
the contrary, the atmosphere was like one colossal church picnic.
The
converging traffic in pre-Metro Washington was like reverse evacuation. The
locals disappeared as endless streams of buses flooded in from all over. So we
walked down from the East Campus, then the site of the School of Foreign
Service and Language Institute, where I worked as an office boy and runner well
before computer networks.
I have spent all of my adult life
singing church music, and my ears are well tuned to songs that praise God, lift
the spirit, and galvanize a congregation—but nothing before or since can
compare with a quarter-million voices singing “We Shall Overcome.”
The intensity of the scene made me
think of the Nuremberg rallies I had seen on newsreels just two decades
earlier, but here the intensity was a force for good, for justice and
brotherhood, in public liturgy devoid of Germanic rigidity and ferocity. The
Mall was America’s backyard bursting with high-spirited friends and neighbors.
The eloquent and mellifluous Dream
of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., rippled over the sea of faces, most
shining with tears of hope and pride, mine included, with the oratorial
antiphon “Let Freedom Ring,” aligning the power of his words and the potency of
God’s Spirit to pull open those stubborn doors, let freedom in, and thump every
heart.
As
the great cool shadow of Abe’s marble porch began reaching eastward, I had to
leave for my evening assignment at the Language Lab library, and I was so
glad I did not have to elbow through the walls of crowds. Many times over until
I reached the street, as if by magic, cheerful openings appeared, often with a
“Thank you brother” exchanged as I moved through the human layers.
Listening
to today’s speeches, I heard none that reached the pinnacle of passionate faith
and poetry of Dr. King. Still, I sensed the same urgency to name and face the
unfinished work. It still had for me the old pull to stand up and speak out,
especially when President Clinton sadly observed that some of our fellow
citizens would make it harder to register to vote than to buy an assault
rifle.
Here
in this little hamlet, there’s nowhere to march, except in the openness of
heart that has made our single-traffic-light village center the largest
distributer of aid to the hungry and those out of work or down on their luck in
all of Washington County, because a great Dream is contagious.
“This
is the Lord’s doing, a marvel in our eyes.” Psalm 118[117]:23.
