Shining Out and Shining In

In the summer of 1963 Martin Luther King, Jr. came to Washington, D.C. He was there to organize the now famous “March on Washington” which culminated in him delivering his “I Have A Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963. This was a year that was marked by racial unrest and civil rights demonstrations. Attack dogs and fire hoses were turned on demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, and Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested. It was while he was under arrest in Birmingham that he wrote, “Letter from Birmingham Jail” where he advocated civil disobedience against unjust laws. That summer the Civil Rights Act was stalled in Congress, and everyone was tense. Many new sources reported that since President John F. Kennedy was unable to convince King and the other civil rights leaders to call off the March on Washington, he publicly announced his support on July 17. He was concerned mostly with the potential of violence occurring. Tom Tipton was working at the all black station, WUST when Martin Luther King, Jr. arrived for an interview and for an appearance on Tom’s mother’s gospel music program. “My mother introduced me to Dr. King, and he invited me to join him and others at the Dunbar Hotel that evening.” Tom went to the hotel that night, the first black owned hotel in Washington, D.C., and it was there that he sat in on the planning for “The March”. “In the early planning stages, those around Dr. King were trying to help him with what he would talk about in his speech.” Reflects Tom, “I wasn’t there for that discussion, but my mother was. My mother was a close friend of Mahalia Jackson. It was Mahalia who said, ‘Martin, why don’t you tell them about your dream.’ Dr. King had been talking about this dream that he had concerning how we should all come together—black folk and white folk. Of course this speech is now considered the greatest speech of the 20th Century. I don’t think it was, but that is a matter of personal preference. I believe that his best speech was the ‘Mountaintop Speech’ he gave in Memphis, when he knew that his time on this earth was almost up.” In Washington, Tom, along with Dunbar classmate Walter Fauntroy, helped the march leaders to galvanize all of the churches and synagogues for the March. “There were meetings with the black leaders in the Jewish synagogues, and Methodists were meeting with Roman Catholics. It was huge!” Tom recalled. During the march it was Tom’s responsibility to make sure there were portable public toilets available along the march route. It is easy to forget the concern and downright fear that many had about the “March on Washington,” and how it could have erupted into rioting. Tom says, “There was something spiritual about the preparation for the March…I felt calm and assured that with Dr. King as the leader, there would not be any trouble. Also keeping things calm was the participation of so many white churches. It was like the time had come at this specific time for a peaceful march of grievance. Many things could have gone wrong, but they didn’t. If you ask me what the most amazing thing that happened in that March on Washington, I would say that there was peace.” “At the March,” says Tom, “there were 250,000 people, but amazingly no one was locked up and nobody went to jail. We prayed a lot and hugged a lot.” During Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, Tom was standing in about the fourth row back with Jim Hawks from WUST radio. “I was looking up,” recalls Tom, “and the Nation of Islam was around him…it was a beautiful day! Martin Luther King Jr. was surrounded on the stage by members of the Islam Community not as guards, but as a sign of strength, unity and support for equal black opportunities of all religious groups. Many people were expecting trouble to break out, but it didn’t. The Holy Spirit was surrounding us…” Tom was not very impressed with the beginning of Dr. King’s speech. “He started out slow. But then as he approached the ‘I have a dream’ segment, the spirit of the Baptist preacher came out, the Holy Spirit took over.” It was at that point that Dr. King connected with what Mahalia Jackson had told him, “Tell them about your dream, Martin.” And he did, and everyone became caught up in the wave that King and the Holy Spirit had started. “White and black,” says Tom, “the Spirit caught everybody—even those who did not understand what the Holy Spirit is—it hit them! The whole place just vibrated…It hit me and went all of the way back to the Washington Monument.” At the time, Tom Tipton was not aware of the historical significance of what he was witnessing. He knew, however, that something was changing. He felt something was happening—he felt different. Everybody felt different, and everybody felt good. He didn’t know what it was…he felt like shouting, but he didn’t know why. Dr. King had preached a sermon that he would get in the Baptist Church almost every Sunday. “A good minister will take you to a place where you are dancing on the ceiling!” said Tom. It was only when the media began to talk and write about the powerful words spoken at the Lincoln Memorial that day in August of 1963 that Tom began to realize how special it was: “I thought to myself, ‘I was a part of it.’ I brought the chicken (my mother had concessions of fried chicken, potato salad and bread for $1.50), I drove a bus, I held the babies in the nursery, I helped an elderly woman up off of the ground where she had fainted…We became proud! There was no looting or stealing, and no fights. And it drifted across the nation from the Lincoln Memorial—across the north and the south and into the White House. This one man, Dr. King, who had been to the mountaintop, who knew one day that he would be assassinated for his beliefs and his leadership in those beliefs, brought us all together.”