Transcripts

text | pdf |

---

LECLAIR LAMBERT: The need to go was to be present for a public demonstration of what we believed in as far as equity and equal rights for all people.

SPEAKER: What was the scene in Washington that weekend?

LECLAIR LAMBERT: That weekend was amazing. Everyone was in a very friendly, warm, loving mood.

SPEAKER: I suppose a sense of unity--

LECLAIR LAMBERT: Very much so.

SPEAKER: --that would be rather rare to run across a city all headed in the same direction.

LECLAIR LAMBERT: All headed in one direction toward this one area, which was the monument where the March started, and it was a sense of purpose, and as I say, unity, and you could just feel it in the air.

SPEAKER: Tell me about the speech "I Have a Dream."

LECLAIR LAMBERT: It was a very hot day. It was 90-plus degrees. Many speeches, and Harry Belafonte was there, and people you'd heard of before, but never got to see. And then finally, when Dr. King came up to speak, and of course, you could hear all of this over the PA system, this confusion of lots of noise because you were so far away, you weren't really attentive to all of the program, I think the harshness, the quiet of the whole crowd when Dr. King came to the microphone to speak was nausea as so to speak, than the actual hubbub of people moving about and milling about during an hour beforehand. So it was just amazing, this huge quiet came over, this mass massive crowd.

MARTIN LUTHER KING: I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

[APPLAUSE]

SPEAKER: Among those in the crowd of 200,000 that day, as Dr. King began to speak was Don Fraser back then, Congressman Don Fraser from Minnesota's 5th District. Fraser wasn't able to make it through the mass of people in front of the monument steps to reach the area set aside for members of Congress. So he listened to Dr. King with the crowd.

DON FRASER: He was moving, I think, both because of the kind of message that Dr. King gave, "I have a dream." And then these hundreds of thousands altogether were listening. It was a very dramatic moment. You had a sense that this would be a historic day, and one looked back in the years to come, and it clearly helped to influence the atmosphere in Washington.

And it was in the middle '60s then that we took these giant steps forward in which the federal government finally took action to guarantee all Americans access to the basic rights of voting, housing, jobs. But I think of all the elements of the struggle that went on in those years that day, that speech was certainly the highlight.

SPEAKER: Was it the speech or just the huge number of people that turned out, do you think, that really had an impact on people in Washington?

DON FRASER: Well, I think it was both. It was kind of the synergy, a least, force of the speech, but it fit the mood, the times, the deep concern.

SPEAKER: For those who were there that day in August of 1963, there seems generally to be a feeling of helping to make history, helping to change the course of history of being a very small part of something very big indeed. Again, LeClair Lambert.

LECLAIR LAMBERT: Halfway through his speech, I knew that this was history that this would be something that for all time people would remember. It was that electric, it was that emotional, it was that spiritual that my sixth sense said, this is history, and we were not there to be a part of history so much. We were there for a reason to be a part of America, of what America is supposed to be.

SPEAKER: I wonder, given that sense of unity, that sense of purpose, if there wasn't also a sense of being unbeatable that nothing was going to stop this thing from happening, and changes were going to be made, and that was all there was to it.

LECLAIR LAMBERT: Very much so, very much so. This spirit of everybody coming together, total strangers, and all just falling into line and marching together and being a part of one thing automatically created that. We were not going to be stopped, and not in a demanding way and not in an arrogant way. We were there, and we were there as one.

SPEAKER: I wonder what happens to that over the 20 years since, that sense of the inevitability of progress and change that was part of that event in that speech in that March. We aren't that unified now. People don't agree in those ways now. There doesn't seem to be a legacy of that.

LECLAIR LAMBERT: I, in fact, wonder if we're not less unified than we were in '63. And in that just brief moment of history, we were what we could be in this country. We were then what we can be as human beings, leaving aside all prejudices and agreements or disagreements, but just coming together because we are human beings, because we are we're a people, and because we believe in some higher sense or of humanity. We lost that brief moment in August 1963. We had it. It never really happened again. I don't think. There have been smaller marches, smaller comings together, but never that special moment.

SPEAKER: LeClair Lambert, one of the more than 200,000 on the Capitol Mall in Washington that August afternoon in 1963, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Shared with the world a dream.

MARTIN LUTHER KING: Lookout Mountain of Tennessee, let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi from every mountainside. Let freedom ring. And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual-- Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty. We are free at last.

[CHEERING]