Written by NewsOne Staff
on January 16, 2012
It was the late spring of 1963, and
my friend Martin was exhausted. The campaign to integrate the public facilities
in Birmingham had been successful but also tremendously taxing. In its
aftermath, he wanted nothing more than to take Coretta and the children away
for a vacation and forget – forget the looming book deadline, the office
politics of his ever-growing Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the
constant need to raise funds.
But a date for the March on
Washington for Jobs and Freedom had been nailed down – Aug. 28 – and Martin
realized he couldn’t plan such a massive undertaking with the usual endless
interruptions. No, if this march were going to come together in time, he would
have to escape all the distractions. (This was a man, after all, whose best
writing was done inside a jail cell.) He needed to get away to a place where
very few people could reach him.
That would be my house in
Riverdale, N.Y.
For the previous three years, I had
been an adviser to Martin Luther King Jr., his personal lawyer and one of his
speechwriters. Stanley Levison, another adviser who had done even more work
with Martin on his speeches than I had, was also a New Yorker. Because of some
dark ops on the part of the FBI, Martin could not deal directly with Stanley,
yet he very much valued his advice, so it made sense for Martin to stay at my
home and have me act as a go-between as we planned the March on Washington –
and the speech Martin would deliver.
Read more at the Washington Post
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