King’s “Dream”—Whose Country ’Tis of Thee?

Eric J. Sundquist’s essay appeared in MQR’s Fall 2007 issue.

Featured Image: Nathaniel Donnett, “Demarcation; The Marked Location of Death, Life, and A Dream Deferred,” 2018, Plastic, gold leaf, books (“King’s Dream” by Eric J. Sundquist), shoestrings, 77″ x 98″

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On the evening of June 11, 1963, President John F. Kennedy delivered a televised speech on civil rights. He spoke forcefully, if belatedly, of a moral issue “as old as the scriptures and as dear as the American Constitution.” Late that night, as he returned home from his work as Mississippi field secretary for the NAACP, Medgar Evers was shot and killed by Byron De La Beckwith, an avowed white supremacist who would not be brought to justice until 1994. At a memorial rally held the day after her husband’s murder, Myrlie Evers addressed an angry audience who had every reason to seek vengeance, but she pleaded with them to persist in the path of nonviolence—to love, not hate. Once she finished speaking, recalled Urban League president Whitney Young, the crowd stood and spontaneously sang “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.” In Young’s view, the singing expressed “deeply felt faith in a country by a people who have had so little reason to keep alive such a belief. They said to America, ‘We believe in you.’”

Young’s account was published in 1964, and it is very likely that his memory of this mournful tribute to Medgar Evers, heard by few, was strongly colored by his memory of the words heard by thousands—and subsequently heard and read by millions more—that launched the famous peroration of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963:

Notwithstanding King’s triumphs in Birmingham and Washington, as well as the landmark civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965, faith in the “sweet land of liberty” was by no means shared by all African Americans. Reacting to what he considered Whitney Young’s delusion, Addison Gayle, Jr. ranked him high among latter-day Booker T. Washingtons and looked for inspiration instead to the slave rebel Nat Turner, in whose messianic uprising he found an antidote to “the absurd and nonsensical philosophy of Martin Luther King” that, as he saw it, had cost Medgar Evers his life.

Whether in explicit mockery of King’s speech or not, there has been no shortage of counterexamples to his apparent endorsement of the patriotic sentiments of the song titled “America,” but also known to many simply by its first line. “You have to be able to laugh to stand up and sing, ‘My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty,’” insisted Malcolm X. “That’s a joke. And if you don’t laugh at it, it’ll crack you up.” Amiri Baraka inserted the lyrics into his 1964 play The Slave, accompanied by the stage direction: “Screams off key like drunken opera singer,” while the jazz musician Charles Mingus once donned an oversized sombrero to sing a satiric version of “America” in which its second line became “sweet land of slavery.” And just this year, the musician Mos Def, performing a program of jazz, standards, and hip-hop at Lincoln Center, riffed on “America” by emphatically repeating the line “Land where my fathers died,” before drifting into “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the implication being that his fathers died not as patriots but as slaves.

King, of course, was nobody’s fool, and he spoke not of present-day realities but of a day still to come when “all of God’s children will be able to sing . . . ‘My country ’tis of thee.’” King knew as well as anyone the pain and sorrow that underlay any African American’s faith in such words. One need think only of an incident that had already brought his family close to the fate of Medgar Evers. While King was waiting to address a meeting of the Montgomery Improvement Association during the 1956 bus boycott, his home was bombed and his wife and infant daughter barely escaped injury. By the time King arrived, a menacing crowd of supporters, some of them armed, had gathered on his lawn to confront the mayor and police commissioner. Coretta remembered that one man squared off with a white policeman, saying, “You got your thirty-eight, I got mine. Let’s shoot it out.” Their anger in all likelihood would have boiled over in retaliatory violence had not King begged the crowd to “love our white brothers” and go home peacefully. Rising out of tensions so strong the least incident might have triggered “the most awful race riot in our history,” as Coretta recalled, she heard the strains of “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” as though the song itself, like the pacifying effect of King’s words, acted as an insecure brake on the simmering violence.

King may or may not have noticed the words of “America” amidst the night’s pandemonium, just as Myrlie Evers may or may not have noticed them amidst her grief seven years later. These peculiar instances of the song’s spontaneous performance, haunting and counterintuitive, remind us that it has held a special, if bittersweet, place in the hearts of African Americans. It tells us, too, that King’s use of it in his 1963 Dream speech was not a matter of sudden or unique inspiration—and not simply because King himself had already used the song in a number of earlier speeches.

King’s proximate source was an address to the 1952 Republican National Convention by Archibald Carey, Jr., from which King borrowed virtually the whole of his famous peroration, from “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” through the incantation “Let freedom ring.” In keeping with its occasion, Carey’s speech contained a good deal of political boilerplate, but he was no apologist for prevailing racial norms. “The string of promises dangled before my people like a glittering necklace,” he said, employing a metaphor more provocative than any ventured by King, “has been fashioned into a tight-fitting noose about their throats, strangling their freedom . . . and sometimes even their hopes.” Eight years hence, African Americans would have reason to be frustrated by President Dwight Eisenhower’s lukewarm support of civil rights, but on the eve of his nomination Carey challenged the party of Lincoln, which the majority of blacks still supported, to fight for freedom not only abroad but also at home.

Because he is “a man without a country,” remarked Julian Mayfield at the Conference of Negro Writers in 1959, the Negro “sings the national anthem sotto voce,” and the same could surely have been said of “America.” Why, indeed, did African Americans care at all to sing a song that seemed at best an ironic commentary on the nation’s failure to make them full and equal citizens?

Part of the answer lies in the song’s early history. In adapting the melody of “God Save the King” to a new set of lyrics in 1831, Samuel F. Smith effectively overthrew monarchical rule in favor of a new nation, conceived in liberty, and his brisk, catchy tune was soon thought of as the “national hymn.” During the Civil War soldiers on both sides found it in the songbooks they carried into battle, and it would be put to a host of social and political uses in years to come. But satiric versions of “America”—more than a century before Charles Mingus and Mos Def—had long since become a staple of antislavery activism. In 1839, for example, William Lloyd Garrison’s magazine Liberator carried a parody of “America” that began “My country! ’tis of thee, / Stronghold of Slavery,” while the black poet James Monroe Whitfield satirized its lyrics in much the same terms in his 1853 poem of the same name.

Especially for those in bondage, however, the song’s promise was real enough, as we find in the journal of Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a Massachusetts minister and antislavery activist who commanded the black Union troops at Port Royal, South Carolina. On January 1, 1863, the Day of Jubilee on which the Emancipation Proclamation took effect, as Higginson waited to receive the colors, there occurred a spontaneous demonstration among the black soldiers and those gathered to celebrate with them:

Seen from our vantage point, Higginson’s account may seem sentimental, and the hopes of the newly freed slaves naive. But it should not be surprising that for those closer to slavery the “choked voice of a race” would be released in the words of “America” and the flag of Union would offer a promise. On January 1, 1863, a people formerly enslaved—at least a portion of them—had a country. They became Americans, though what kind of Americans remained to be determined, even by Abraham Lincoln.

One former slave recalled that the President stopped at her Washington, D. C., contraband camp on several occasions, sometimes mingling with the older freed persons rather than sitting on the platform reserved for distinguished guests. One day, after the opening prayer delivered by an elder, all of those gathered, black and white together, Lincoln included, stood up and sang “America.” Other songs performed that day included “I Thank God I’m Free at Last,” during which, it was said, many of the “old folks forgot about the President being present and began to shout and yell,” while Lincoln stood “like a stone and bowed his head,” as though “the Holy Ghost was working on him.” It is not likely that Martin Luther King had this scene in mind when he ended his Dream speech with the powerhouse words of the “old Negro spiritual: ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’” Without doubt, however, he had Lincoln in mind, and the appearance of Lincoln at the outset of King’s speech illuminates the purpose of “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” at the end.

In his opening words “Fivescore years ago,” so antique and magical, King evoked Lincoln before not quite naming him in the remainder of his sentence: “a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation.” Had King stopped speaking after the first few words, his audience would still have thought of Lincoln, the opening of the Gettysburg Address, “Four score and seven years ago,” being among the most famous words in American history—more widely recognized, perhaps, than “When in the Course of human events” or “We the People of the United States.” Insofar as King’s purpose, as he immediately stated, was to address the meaning of the Emancipation Proclamation in its centennial year of 1963, his allusion to Lincoln’s best-known speech might at first have seemed a rhetorical trick. How many people, after all, would have recognized “Whereas on the twenty-second day of September?” Yet as King understood—and as his unusual opening to the Dream speech makes evident—Lincoln’s stirring address at Gettysburg would not have taken the same shape or carried the same significance absent the Emancipation Proclamation.

Although King’s criticism of the nation grew more radical, even somewhat bitter, over the course of the 1960s, he seemed to have few peers in his admiration of the ideals of the Founding Fathers. King, wrote Julius Lester, believed in America “as if he were one of the signers of the Constitution. He loved America as if he had sewn the first flag. And he articulated a dream for America more forcefully than any man since Thomas Jefferson.” King believed in America, in other words, in much the same way, and spoke of it in much the same terms, as Abraham Lincoln, nowhere more succinctly than in the core message of his Dream speech:

Brown v. Board of Education was a new promissory note, a long-awaited renewal of the note issued in 1863, which renewed the one issued in 1776. To put it this way highlights King’s belief, shared with Lincoln, not only that the “unalienable Rights” promised in the Declaration belonged to blacks, as well as whites, but also that this promise was not, in fact, at odds with the Constitution, even before the Civil War amendments.

What King shared with Lincoln stands in greater relief if we turn briefly to his sermon “The Death of Evil upon the Seashore,” first preached at a service commemorating the second anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education in 1956 and then revised for inclusion in his sermon collection Strength to Love in 1963. In both instances King developed an extended allegory of the Exodus in which the forces of segregation and colonialism are finally overcome as the Red Sea parts and oppressed peoples, both those in America and those abroad, win their freedom. Although King drew in both cases on traditional sermonic materials to depict the hard, halting journey to Canaan and the evanescence of freedom’s dream, the ideological tributaries and metaphoric structure of the 1963 sermon reflect a maturation of thought also evident in the Dream speech. Both sermons drive toward messages of compassion and faith in God’s plan for delivery into the Promised Land, but in adding citations of Jefferson and Lincoln to the revised version, King anchored his modern adaptation of the Exodus more securely in its American historical equivalent—not simply the end of slavery but rather the ensuing century-long struggle to make real the promises of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.

Quoting Jefferson’s well-known profession that the question of slavery, “like a fire-bell in the night,” filled him with terror that “the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away,” King portrayed the author of the Declaration of Independence as a man of principle at war with himself, as well as with his time and place. King likewise took note of Lincoln’s “torments and vacillations,” and in referring to Lincoln’s proclamation as an “executive order,” he called attention to the power available to contemporary presidents—first Eisenhower, then Kennedy, and later Lyndon Johnson—should they overcome their own vacillations on the matter of racial justice. More important, King located the “moral foundation” of the Emancipation Proclamation in the explanation Lincoln addressed to Congress on December 1, 1862: “in giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free,—honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve.”

King’s use of Lincoln thus comported with his contention, shared by nineteenth-century abolitionists, that the moral injury done to whites by racial prejudice might be worse than the physical injury done to blacks. But King joined himself as well to Lincoln’s belief that in giving “freedom to the free” lay the essence of Union, without whose preservation the Declaration of Independence would be stripped of its transcendental purpose. It is of particular importance, therefore, that the genealogy of political fathers to which King makes himself heir includes, in addition to Jefferson and Lincoln, that other “great American” Frederick Douglass, and that the particular passage from Douglass he cites is his assessment of the Emancipation Proclamation on the eve of its issuance:

By the time King revised his “Death of Evil” materials yet again for inclusion in Where Do We Go from Here?, published in 1967, he was despondent about the retreat of white liberals, close to impotent in addressing the violence of the urban North, and under heightened attack by Black Power radicals. In a darker mood, King regretted that neither Jefferson nor Lincoln, nor any of the Founding Fathers, “had a strong, unequivocal belief in the equality of the black man,” and he took note of their acquiescence in prevailing theories of scientific racism. Yet even now, the sequence of his argument—from Jefferson to Lincoln to Douglass—was intended less to tear down the Founding Fathers than to add a black man to their pantheon. In examining Douglass’s anger and frustration over the betrayal of Reconstruction, moreover, King made explicit an aspect of his argument less evident in 1963.

Despite the “luminous rhetoric” of emancipation, King pointed out, the post-bellum nation turned over millions of acres of land to white settlers in the West and gave generations of European peasants a new beginning, while its “oldest peasantry, the Negro, was denied everything but a legal status he could not use, could not consolidate, and could not even defend.” The inscription on the Statue of Liberty proclaims the nation the “mother of exiles,” said King. Whereas the nation did nourish her white exiles, however, “she evinced no motherly concern or love for her exiles from Africa,” and the sorrow song of old was still applicable: “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, a long ways from home.” Or, as he said more pointedly in the Dream speech, the African American remains an “exile in his own land.”

Rather than dwell on the subordination of the rights of blacks to those of white ethnic immigrants, however, King turned the metaphor of exile in a revealing direction. Here he cast back to a 1958 sermon in which he had likened the nation to the prodigal son, wandering in “the far country of segregation” but ready for the favor of a patient and loving God: “I will bring you back to your true home.” Lamenting now that the nation’s “sojourn in the far country of racism” had brought about “moral and spiritual famine,” King proceeded to argue that the nation itself was in exile, that “national suicide” could be averted only if America returned to “her true home, ‘one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.’”

What does it mean for the nation to return to itself, to return to its true home? This was the question King posed in 1963. It was also the question Lincoln posed in 1863—and had been posing for well over a decade. We find a cogent expression of it in one of his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas. Who in America, he asked, belongs to the posterity of the Revolutionary generation? The Jeffersonian promise, “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” Lincoln posits, was made not just to the native descendents of the Founding Fathers but to all who have, in the meantime, adopted America as their new home. By virtue of that choice, they too are bound by “the electric cord in [the] Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together.” If this promise defines the Union and constitutes its grounds for perpetuity, for native-born and immigrant alike, it must also apply to those presently held in bondage.

In its patently scriptural call for a “new birth of freedom,” the Gettysburg Address cast the Civil War as an act of purification and redemption—specifically, a baptismal rebirth. Not only would the Union be reborn in its preservation, Lincoln asserted, but the first principles of the Declaration would be reborn as well. Although the few words he spoke in November of 1863 were destined to achieve far greater renown, he once remarked that his emancipation order was “the central act of my administration, and the greatest event of the nineteenth century.” As Douglass recognized, and King after him, Lincoln’s battlefield elegy, notwithstanding its stunning verbal beauty, depended for its significance on his “momentous decree,” as King called it in the Dream speech. Issued only when Lincoln was sure of his constitutional justification, the Emancipation Proclamation allowed him, as he said at Gettysburg, to take up the “unfinished work” of the Founding Fathers and transform the “proposition” that all men are created equal into a bequest that applied not only to both sections but also to both races.

Seen from this perspective, Douglass’s claim that Emancipation Day would be greater than the Fourth of July, which was concerned with “the mere political birth of the nation” was in no way eccentric. Like other blacks, especially slaves and former slaves, Douglass recognized that the Fourth of July was at best a paradoxical holiday—witness his famous speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” which compared the plight of African Americans to Babylonian exile: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion.” In anticipating Lincoln’s central metaphor, the nation’s political rebirth, Douglass likewise anticipated his ulterior meaning.

Douglass, like Lincoln, believed that the Preamble of the Constitution, with its stated intention “to form a more perfect union,” reiterated the Declaration and therefore that the Union preceded the Constitution. Having renounced William Lloyd Garrison’s view that the Constitution was a proslavery document—Garrison once burned a copy of the document, denouncing it as a “covenant with death, an agreement with hell,” before grinding its ashes under his heel—Douglass had also, like Lincoln, come to believe adamantly that the end of slavery, explicit in the Declaration, was implicit in the Constitution. The Founding Fathers, he argued, “carefully excluded from the Constitution any and every word which could lead to the belief that they meant it for persons of only one complexion.” Lincoln, in his debates with Stephen Douglas, likewise found that the Jeffersonian creed, “that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” reflected the Founding Fathers’ “understanding of the justice of the Creator to His creatures. Yes, gentlemen, to all His creatures.” By making no explicit mention of slavery in the Constitution, Lincoln determined, they purposely employed “covert language” so that when the Constitution was read in the future “by intelligent and patriotic men,” there should be “nothing on the face of this great charter of liberty suggesting that such a thing as negro slavery had ever existed among us.”

Preservation of the Union was Lincoln’s first priority, and neither he nor Douglass, nor King a century later, overlooked the distinct limits of the Emancipation Proclamation, whether as a pragmatic military order or as a precursor to the Civil War amendments. (As C. Vann Woodward once remarked, “there was no Equality Proclamation to match the Emancipation Proclamation.”) Both recognized, however, that the Union would be rightly preserved only with the end of slavery; only then might the nation be returned “home” to itself, its exile ended. Here we may think of the Union soldier who asserted that the Emancipation Proclamation would count “more than all the victories we can win in the field.” All the same, he mused that the Moses in Washington needed soldiers like him to liberate the black Israelites. The only way out of “this horror blinding the nation,” he continued, “is by the door of Justice to the oppressed. We must ‘let the people go,’ at any rate. If it be through the Red Sea, still they must go.”

On January 1, 1863, cannon were fired, church bells were rung, and orators great and small let loose at public observances throughout the North, as well as Union-held areas of the South. Formerly known among slaves as “Heartbreak Day,” owing to the custom of holding large slave auctions on that day, January 1 would be known henceforth as a day of deliverance and jubilation, far surpassing the other holidays observed by blacks as occasions of thanksgiving and protest. Higginson’s report from Port Royal gave but one instance of “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” being sung at such celebrations, at that time and long afterward.

Regularly commemorated in coming years and woven into historical pageants such as The Star of Ethiopia, written by W. E. B. Du Bois for the 1913 Emancipation Exposition in New York City, Lincoln’s proclamation became blacks’ founding document, their reclaimed Declaration of Independence. As the Civil War amendments were stripped of their power and the reunion of North and South ushered in the age of Jim Crow, however, the importance of emancipation faded among white Americans, while what Gabor Boritt has deemed the “Gettysburg gospel,” with its vision of a common national sacrifice, became ascendant. As Lincoln was reclaimed as a friend of the South, even by radical segregationists such as Thomas Dixon, his iconic meaning likewise fractured along racial lines, nowhere more visibly than at the Lincoln Memorial.

When it was dedicated in 1922, the Memorial celebrated sectional reconciliation at the expense of black rights, with Lincoln’s radicalism diminished and his likely compassion for the defeated South, had he lived, magnified. In the words of the commemorative volume produced for the occasion, the Memorial represented “the restoration of the brotherly love of the two sections” in the marble image of a man “as dear to the hearts of the South as to those of the North.” Aged Union and Confederate veterans were photographed side by side, and black guests, accordingly, were seated in a segregated section. William Howard Taft, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and chairman of the Lincoln Memorial Commission, said nothing about slavery in his remarks, while President Warren G. Harding assured the audience that Lincoln would not have resorted to force to abolish slavery. Edwin Markham read a version of his poem “Lincoln, the Man of the People,” which idealized emancipation as an extension of Lincoln’s prairie values: “The grip that swung the ax in Illinois / Was on the pen that set a people free.”

Of greatest interest as a precursor to King’s speech, however, was the one offered by Robert Russa Moton, successor to Booker T. Washington as president of Tuskegee Institute. Following his speech, the United States Marine Band played “America,” the audience standing to sing, and it was therefore fitting that Moton, without quoting directly from the song, nonetheless summoned up its spirit in his opening words: “When the Pilgrim Fathers set foot upon the shores of America, in 1620, they laid the foundations of our national existence upon the bed-rock of liberty. . . . When the charter of the nation’s birth was assailed [by southern secession], the sons of liberty declared anew the principles of their fathers and liberty became co-extensive with the Union.” Moton continued largely in this vein and concluded by pledging the “unreserved cooperation” of twelve million black Americans to the project of sectional reunion.

This is the speech that Moton gave and that appeared in the official commemorative volume, as well as in collections such as Carter Woodson’s Negro Orators and Their Orations, first published in 1925 and reprinted in 1969. But it is not the speech that Moton wrote for the occasion. Not unlike John Lewis forty years later at the March on Washington, as Adam Fairclough has shown, Moton had his speech censored and rewritten by those anxious to protect the politics of reunion and erase any elements of protest. Missing was Moton’s assertion that the Lincoln Memorial was “but a hollow mockery, a symbol of hypocrisy, unless we can make real in our national life, in every state and every section, the things for which he died.” Missing was his condemnation of mob violence within “our own borders.” Missing was his contention that, unless America comes to apply the Constitution to all its citizens, its professions of equal rights are “as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal before the nations of the earth.”

Moton’s allusion to the apostle Paul’s lesson on charity in First Corinthians—“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal”—may have been his own device, but it could also have been borrowed from Ida B. Wells’s 1893 address “Lynch Law in All Its Phases.” Reflecting on the post-Reconstruction dismantling of black rights and the retrenchment of the Republican Party, Wells longed for a revival of the crusading spirit of abolitionism, so that:

Every member of this “great composite nation,” argued Wells, should be able to sing the “national hymn,” be it “The Star-Spangled Banner” or “America.” Her cunning use of scripture makes this point in stark terms.

Greater than faith or hope, counsels Paul in the conclusion to this much-beloved chapter of First Corinthians, is charity, by which he means the selfless love of Jesus, which is to say, the kind of love that King advocated time and again in the face of racial discrimination and violence. Even if it were spoken in the language of angels, said Paul, his message would have no meaning—no “soul force,” as King, following Gandhi, might have said—unless it be given in the spirit of love. This alone would draw an important line from Wells, through Moton, to King, but her allusion to Paul’s epistle carries with it a further subtext at once commanding and forbidding, namely, his offer of the exemplary love of the Christian martyr: “though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.” In associating the lynched black martyrs of the South with Pauline doctrine—she described several horrendous lynchings, including that of a man branded with hot irons and burned alive—Wells effectively sanctified their sacrifice while making her invocation of the “sweet land of liberty” all the more painful.

This was the version of “America” stricken from Moton’s speech, and we would be right to hear it, warring with contrary strains as Higginson heard them and as Lincoln sang them in the contraband camp, in every subsequent use of the song by African Americans.

Although Mahalia Jackson did not sing “America” at the March on Washington, she did perform it at the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, the first occasion on which King spoke from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. More important is the story she tells of her inclusion of the song in a 1961 concert performed at Constitution Hall, where Marian Anderson had been barred from singing by the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1939, an incident that led to the first deliberate use of the Lincoln Memorial for a civil rights protest—and where, of course, Anderson included “My Country ’Tis of Thee” in her program. After the concert, “pack-jammed with colored folks” who clapped and sang, as Jackson recounted, she was confronted in her dressing room by a sobbing sixteen-year-old girl who asked, “Miss Jackson, how can you sing ‘My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty’ as if you believed it when you know the white people in America don’t want us here? It’s not our country.” Except for the barriers overcome between Anderson’s exclusion from Constitution Hall and Jackson’s own performance, her reply might have seemed just as deluded to the girl as her repertoire. “Yes, honey, it is our country, too!” she said. “We colored folks were brought here long ago and we’ve been born here and raised our families here. We’re Americans as much as anybody else.”

Jackson’s eloquence lay in her singing voice rather than her pat words of reassurance, but in her own way she was paraphrasing The Souls of Black Folk, in which Du Bois concluded his meditation on the sorrow songs—songs in which he heard “the voice of exile”—with a set of challenging questions:

Black “pride,” Du Bois insinuated, preceded “Pilgrims’ pride.” Sown for three hundred years with the blood and toil of Africans, the “land where [our] fathers died,” in this account, carried a claim to freedom prior to the Constitution, prior even to the Declaration of Independence—a claim to freedom nowhere better expressed than in the slave spirituals themselves.

Although Du Bois was not ready to signify upon the American promise so stingingly as would Malcolm X—“we didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on us,” Malcolm once quipped, borrowing from Cole Porter—he understood the moral and economic claim African Americans had on the “sweet land of liberty.” When sung in the voices of slaves and their descendants such as Marian Anderson and Mahalia Jackson, the lyrics of “America,” as Du Bois implied, were both a sorrow song and an unfulfilled promissory note. They spoke of a nation to which African Americans did not yet fully belong but which did belong to them—a nation in which they were exiles but also, therefore, a nation in exile from itself.

All these strains of “America,” which were to reach their apotheosis at the March on Washington, were already present in the speech prepared for an oratorical contest by a fifteen-year-old Atlanta student in 1944. Speaking on the subject of “The Negro and the Constitution,” and taking his cue from the Emancipation Proclamation as it might be interpreted within a framework provided by the Declaration of Independence, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and the Gettysburg Address, as well as “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the young man hoped that his people, “inspired by the example of Lincoln, [and] imbued with the spirit of Christ,” would soon “cast down the last barrier to perfect freedom.” In relating the story of Marian Anderson’s electrifying performance at the Lincoln Memorial, he too, as he said of her, melded the language of black religion with the language of American liberty: “When the words of ‘America’ and ‘Nobody Knows De Trouble I Seen’ rang out over that great gathering, there was a hush on the sea of uplifted faces, black and white, and a new baptism of liberty, equality and fraternity.” Like Du Bois, the student declared that the destiny of African Americans was synonymous with that of the nation: “Before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched across the pages of history the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence, we were here.”

Traveling home from the contest by bus, the student and his teacher, after being denounced as “black sons of bitches” when they failed to give up their seats to white passengers quickly enough, were forced to stand in the aisle for the ninety-mile trip. “That night will never leave my memory,” Martin Luther King would later recall. “It was the angriest I have ever been in my life.” And yet, in the speech he had just given, King had preemptively transcended that anger. Whether or not the speech was entirely his own composition, he had already, at age fifteen, articulated the promise of emancipation for a new age—the promise of a new “new birth of freedom”—and had tested the Lincolnian role he would assume on August 28, 1963, and relinquish on April 4, 1968.

In his book on the Emancipation Proclamation, written for its centennial, John Hope Franklin regretted that this “great American document of freedom” had been unjustly neglected. To judge from official conduct at the time, little was going to change in 1963. Despite the fact that the commission overseeing the Civil War centennial strove to maintain balance between North and South—the formal opening on January 8, 1961 took place simultaneously at Grant’s Tomb in New York City and Lee’s Tomb in Lexington, Virginia—celebrations were marked by ongoing conflict over what could and could not be said, as well as the efforts of some southern states to form their own organization so that black rights need not be mentioned at all.

The centennial commemoration of the Emancipation Proclamation, held at the Lincoln Memorial on September 22, 1962 (in recognition of Lincoln’s issuance of the Preliminary Proclamation), was no less contentious. Thurgood Marshall played a minor part, and Mahalia Jackson sang, though she had nothing to say about the event in her autobiography. Apprehensive about alienating southern Democrats, President Kennedy, who would refuse to issue a “Second Emancipation Proclamation” on January 1, 1963, provided a prerecorded address memorable only for its banality. “One hundred years ago today Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation,” said the president. It “was not an end” but “a beginning”—all words that would be echoed to much greater rhetorical purpose a year later by King—and he congratulated the Negro for “his loyalty to the United States and to democratic institutions,” despite humiliation and deprivation, and for working tirelessly “for his own salvation.” After remarking the “spectacular quickening of the pace of full emancipation” over the previous twenty-five years, Kennedy closed by gingerly paraphrasing Lincoln’s 1862 message to Congress: “In giving rights to others which belong to them, we give rights to ourselves and to our country.”

Far more impressive, not least for its deep resonance with King’s later speech, was Archibald MacLeish’s poem “At the Lincoln Memorial,” composed for the occasion. As though it were the sculpture of Lincoln himself, “the image of a man / Staring at stillness on a marble floor,” MacLeish’s poem broods with melancholy intensity on a simple question: “Is this our destiny—defeated dream?” Peeling away the hypocrisy that hovered over the Civil War centennial, MacLeish’s poem mingled antebellum time with contemporary, with the “tarnished water” of the Potomac River, like the waters of history, pouring into the sea of eternity but bearing the refuse

Laying an image of sectional reunion on top of master and slave, still bound together not by forgiveness and reconciliation but by the “dry bitter thong” of hatred, MacLeish took a searching look at the price paid for reunion, no less great in its way than that paid for Union. In quoting from Lincoln’s 1861 remarks at Independence Hall, MacLeish was true to the president who divined transcendental liberty in the Declaration of Independence:

In underscoring Lincoln’s overriding intention “To save the Union: / To renew / That promise and that hope again,” however, MacLeish was also true to the president for whom black freedom conflicted with his constitutional powers and emancipation had to be achieved as an act of war. The marble Lincoln, like the president at war, “sits there in his doubt alone,” conceiving of the authority for an act that frees, not men and women alone, but the nation itself from a terrible burden. MacLeish’s Lincoln

By this point in the poem it is clear enough that the “dream” is equivocal, embracing both Lincoln’s salvation of the nation and the lingering “shame” of the “promise” unfulfilled, and in concluding the poem MacLeish pleads with the river to “Think of our destiny, the place / Named in our covenant where we began,” and with Lincoln “To scour the hate clean and the rusted blood” so as to “Renew the holy dream we were meant to be!”

MacLeish’s poem and the ceremony for which it was written were little noticed at the time and are less remembered today. But for the March on Washington, observance of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation might almost have escaped notice, except by African Americans, amidst the festive commemorations at Gettysburg and elsewhere. Whereas the dream of Union, of reunion, had been fulfilled, the dream of emancipation—the black dream of being able to say “my country”—that dream “goes on,” unfinished.

“This is my country,” said Ralph Bunche, speaking in honor of United Nations Day at Tougaloo College in the fall of 1963. “My ancestors and I helped to build it.” Undertaking a road trip sponsored by Holiday magazine that same season (modeled on John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley), John A. Williams published the results of his encounter with America, not always segregated but never colorblind, in a book presumptively entitled This is My Country, Too. In their 1968 single “This is My Country,” Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions embraced a moderate Black Power political stance even as their gospel message of brotherhood and love was meant as a rejoinder to the fact that “some people don’t think we have the right to say it’s my country.” By then, however, King’s increased militancy, specifically his outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War, left him vulnerable to the charge that he himself actively discouraged black allegiance to America. Dismayed by his antiwar speeches, the black journalist Carl Rowan found it tragically ironic that doubt about black loyalty should be created by King, who had done as much as anyone “to make America truly the Negro’s country, too.”

Whether in migration within the United States or emigration to Europe, Africa, or elsewhere, African American history is marked throughout by searches for a country, a home, of one’s own. Where once the slave spirituals spoke of a world to come in which heaven and liberty were synonymous—“And before I’d be a slave / I’d be buried in my grave / And go home to my Lord and be free,” says “Oh Freedom,” a spiritual sung frequently during the civil rights era—post-emancipation blacks more often sought literal Promised Lands. Some expressed their longing not in plans for colonization or expatriation but rather in demands for territorial sovereignty within the United States. Elijah Muhammad, for example, insisted in a 1959 speech that, if whites refuse to grant equal rights, they must instead provide sufficient land to establish a Black Republic, “a home on this earth we can call our own.” (In the Atlanta home of a Nation of Islam minister the following year, Malcolm X later recalled, he sat with members of the Ku Klux Klan who were at that time trying to make a deal with Muhammad to provide a county-sized tract of land where the Nation could establish its own segregated state.) No less grandly, the National Black Government Conference called in 1968 for the creation of the “Republic of New Africa,” which was to comprise five southern states ceded by the government, along with $400 billion in “back pay.”

Whether plausible or fanciful, such searches for “my country” were encompassed in Chester Himes’s somber observation about black migration and emigration in his 1965 novel Cotton Comes to Harlem:

“My ‘old country’ is Mississippi,” wrote Roger Wilkins in 1974, “and I can trace the trail only three generations back, to Holly Springs, where it seems to peter out. Slavery broke the link with Africa. Our first American experience was to be de-Africanized and made into chattel.” Given the profound flourishing of African diasporic culture in the modern era, Wilkins’s assessment was myopic, but it captured well both the relative dead-end of African repatriation and, what is more important, the right blacks have to claim the South specifically, as well as the nation at large, as their true home. Two contemporary responses to King’s Dream speech make this point clearly.

Living in Ghana with a group of fellow black American expatriates at the time of the March on Washington, Maya Angelou was disillusioned with King’s tactics (we were “brave revolutionaries, not pussyfooting nonviolent cowards”) and his showmanship (“who is he going to pray to this time, the statue of Abe Lincoln?”). But the group decided, nevertheless, to stage their own parallel march, if only to honor Du Bois, their hero, the news of whose death they received just as they set out. A mix of American émigrés, Peace Corps workers, and Ghanaian friends marched to the American embassy, where they mocked the black American soldiers who were raising the flag at dawn. “That flag won’t cover you in Alabama,” they jeered, but their anger, Angelou realized, was deeply tempered by the poignant realization that this was “our flag and our only flag”—that it was in the United States, not in Africa, that their ancestors had labored and died, where they had “worked and dreamed of ‘a better by and by.’” The same doubleness of emotion expressed in every black rendition of “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” flooded through Angelou: “I shuddered to think that while we wanted that flag dragged in the mud and sullied beyond repair, we also wanted it pristine, its white stripes, summer cloud white. Watching it wave in the breeze of a distance made us nearly choke with emotion. It lifted us up with its promise and broke our hearts with its denial.”

Back home, Alice Walker joined the throng marching in Washington. Too far away to see the speakers well, she could still hear King clearly, “a man who truly had his tongue wrapped around the roots of Southern black religious consciousness.” In King’s challenge to “go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana,” Walker heard a black man demanding that blacks go to the South, not leave it, demanding that we fight “where we were born and raised and destroy the forces that sought to disinherit us.” Born and raised in Eatonton, Georgia, Walker wrote, “I was an exile in my own town,” but in King’s powerful cadenza of “let freedom ring” she heard a startling affirmation of her own rights: “I, in fact, had claim to the land of my birth. Those red hills of Georgia were mine, and nobody was going to force me away from them until I myself was good and ready to go.” So it was that Frederick Douglass, in his 1848 “Letter to My Old Master,” said that “we want to live in the land of our birth, and to lay our bones by the side of our fathers’; and nothing short of an intense love of personal freedom keeps us from the South.”

The Lincoln Memorial marks a symbolic junction between North and South. The Washington Monument and the Capitol rise up to the east; behind the Memorial to the west, across the Potomac River, lies Arlington National Cemetery, established in 1864 on the former site of the Robert E. Lee family home. Among those recently buried in Arlington when King spoke in 1963 was Medgar Evers. Although she had planned to bury him in Jackson, Myrlie Evers realized that, as a member of the national board of the American Veterans Committee, Medgar could make a more lasting statement of his commitment to American freedom by being laid to rest in Arlington. Here, as she understood upon passing the Lincoln Memorial on the way to the cemetery, he would be, as she said, “a great American” among “other American heroes.” It was, after all, his country, too.

Following the service, Myrlie and her children were received by President Kennedy at the White House for condolences, photographs, and souvenirs. But only after she returned home and received Medgar’s personal effects, collected at the time of his murder, did the cost of freedom, from one century to another, sink in. In his wallet she found a five-dollar bill: “On the bill was Lincoln’s face,” she remembered, “and on Lincoln’s face was Medgar’s blood. One had freed the Negroes from slavery. . . . The other had worked to finish the job. Both were assassinated.” So, too, would Kennedy be assassinated; and so, too, would Martin Luther King, Jr.

In what way America had become King’s country would remain a matter of dispute for many years to come, but no one had a greater claim to sing “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” and no one since Lincoln had done more to return the nation to “her true home.”