Reclaiming The Dream (My First March)

The day was August 28, 2010. If you know your history, you know that August 28 is a special day. This year was the forty-seventh anniversary. Forty-seven years since August 28, 1963, which was the day of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Forty-seven years since Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his "I have a dream," speech.

It was a Saturday and I woke up early, very early. They were calling for big lines at the metro stations. The '63 march was being talked about for weeks and weeks. A new march was scheduled. I was going to go and march with my friend Debbie and all the thousands of others. This 2010 march was called the Reclaim The Dream March. It would be my first march.

Another event was planned for the same day. It was a rally of conservatives, happening not on the mall, but actually on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, a bold very move by the conservatives. Of course no one group of people owns the history of America. It's there for all of us. And although I did not agree with the talk and viewpoints of these conservatives, they were entitled to gather and say what they wanted. The conservative speakers who were going to broadcast their voices on this day were not in the White House. I was comforted by this. Times have changed.

But I was worried. The word conservative, taken in a political context, often rings very strangely in my ears. I'm willing to bet that in the 1963 march--as well as in the civil rights movement--that conservative participants were in the minority. Now, on this day, two very different groupings of people were heading down in huge numbers to Washington, D.C. I was worried about trouble. And they even prepped us about this before the march.

Like so many others, I was simply there to honor the memory of Dr. King as well as to honor and consider the great journey toward equality and freedom, which is one of the most important journeys of the human species. Good work has been done, but there is still much more to accomplish.

It turned out to be a good day and a great march. Pretty much all of the conservative rally goers that I saw simply stood there and watched us walk by. I'm not ready to take you through all the details of this day. Perhaps in my 100 Days book I'll delve a little deeper. Right now, I want to thank Debbie and Luna for accompanying me on this hopeful day. It was a day of tearful eyes, crying for pains of the past, and crying for the great beauty of something better. Equality and civil rights are very important. Just like the idea of good health. Equality is connected to freedom, and without freedom and some kind of descent health, what does a person have? Health care is a big business, and people suffer because of this. Discrimination still happens everyday.

And so we must remember love and Dr. King and the freedom that he worked for. We must remember that we have legs to stand up with. And remember this too: we have fantastic minds that allow for solving problems in peaceful ways. I hear Dr. King speak and I am moved to work harder and act kinder. He was a writer and a speaker and a friend to freedom.

But there are a few specifics that need to be mentioned. Debbie and Luna and I marched, but where did we start? We started at Dunbar High School. Dunbar High School, on Jersey Ave., Northwest, was America's first public high school for black students. We marched from there, down through the streets of Washington, under the hot sun, past the museums, past the National Mall, and over to the future site of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial. (That's right. A new memorial is coming to D.C. One year from now and it should be open.) And there were more speakers at this site, including Martin Luther King III, the son of Dr. King.

And from there, we walked back to the mall. They had a really good exhibit set up on the grass near the center of the mall. I'll post a photo below. And on the speakers they were playing a continuous collection of Dr. King's speeches. Hearing those words in the air in D.C., it was a beautiful tribute to a bygone beauty, Dr. King.

The exhibit where we heard his recorded speeches:

I took these photos too. Scrolling down, they are in order, from Dunbar High School to the future site of the Dr. King Memorial: