An Unfinished Dream

Very few people remember the first speech that Martin Luther King Jr. gave from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It wasn't "I Have a Dream," and it took place more than six years before the famous 1963 March on Washington.

The date was May 17, 1957—three years to the day since the United States Supreme Court had held racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education. King and his civil-rights-movement colleagues wanted to use the Brown anniversary to bring the broader goals of the Southern black freedom struggle to the attention of the nation's political leaders.

Hardly five months had passed since the triumphal end of the Montgomery bus boycott when the federal courts' extension of Brown from schools to seating practices on municipal buses had vindicated a yearlong struggle by the black citizenry of the Alabama city that a century earlier had been the Confederacy's capital. Twenty-six-year-old Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., pastor of Montgomery's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church for hardly a year, had been elected president of the protest effort following the arrest of Mrs. Rosa Parks, a respected civic activist, for refusing to surrender her bus seat to a white man. The black community withdrew its patronage from the city buses en masse, and when white officials refused to negotiate a compromise in segregation's strictures, the black activists filed suit, leading to the Supreme Court order that extended Brown and sent black riders back to Montgomery's now integrated buses.

King and his advisers wanted to use Montgomery's fame and success to launch a crusade that would target far more than just public-seating practices. King was as committed to grounding the struggle in religious faith and the church as he was to confronting President Dwight D. Eisenhower's refusal to publicly endorse racial equality, so the May 17 Washington gathering called itself the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom while throwing down a gauntlet not far from the Oval Office's door.

But the title of King's first Lincoln Memorial speech reveals why now, in early 2009, it should be remembered rather than forgotten: "Give Us the Ballot." Calling the Brown decision "a great beacon light of hope to millions of disinherited people throughout the world," King decried white opposition to the ruling but quickly shifted his focus to the "conniving methods" that Southern officials were still using "to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters" all across the region. "So our most urgent request to the president of the United States and every member of Congress is to give us the right to vote."

Applause from the audience of some 20,000 people interrupted King's remarks, but he launched into a repeated clarion call for greater protection of Southern blacks' right to vote:

"Give us the ballot and we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights …

"Give us the ballot and we will no longer plead to the federal government for passage of an anti-lynching law …