CU Prof reflects on 50th ann. of March on Washington

Today marks the 50^th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Probably best remembered for the keynote speech given by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the “I Have a Dream” speech.  However that dramatic speech was something that was unscripted, explains Clemson University Political Science Professor Dr. Joseph Stewart.  “It really is a momentous day in American history because it really kind of brought home the issue nationally.  We have to remember that at that point the media was a lot less pervasive than it is now, so the Civil Rights Movement was only getting covered kind of episodically and it was something that could be seen as only happening in the Deep South and we weren’t getting that much coverage.  The television was actually a fairly new medium at the time, network news was fairly new.  In terms of actually getting a very dramatic raising of this issue to a different level, I think the March on Washington was just a classic case of social and political change.  In addition, the oratory of Dr. King was dramatic and interestingly the part of it that we remember, the “I Have A Dream” part was adlibbed that that was not part of his original speech.  What we remember most dramatically about the speech or about that particular day was something that certainly he had thought about and had used in other speeches, but was not part of prepared remarks for that day.” Tens of thousands of people will be back at the Lincoln Memorial today to mark the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. President Obama will stand where Dr. King stood on that day years ago. His speech and that march are widely credited with helping to pass the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965.