40 years later, Mainers recall speech by King

PORTLAND – Forty years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous speech in Washington, D.C., where he immortalized the phrase “I have a dream.”

Mainers who were there were recalling the day, 40 years ago Thursday, when King addressed a quarter-million people in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

Gerald Talbot of Portland knew he was witnessing something enormous when he traveled to Washington to watch the speech. He knew when he heard and saw the hundreds of buses bringing people from all across the country to the march.

“We stood out there in the sun, and as far as the temperature was concerned, we were baking,” said Talbot, who was elected Maine’s first black legislator in 1972 and later became head of the Maine NAACP. “Until they introduced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and that seemed to give everybody life. And it seemed to give everybody new enthusiasm.

“Those of us that were either worn out, or kind of, some people were on the ground or whatever, it just lifted us right up, and from that moment on, it was just a magical, dramatic moment for all of us.”

King’s speech, familiar to us on scratchy old film with faded audio, is now taught in universities, covered in textbooks and seen as a defining moment in the civil rights movement.

It was also a defining moment for many of the 100 or so Mainers who were there, including Rabbi Harry Sky.

Sky didn’t know many black people, but “I always had an intellectual feeling of equality – of everybody is a child of God, we are all deserving of a chance, whether you’re black or white, man or woman,” he said. “But there it became concrete. It is one thing to have a theory. It is another thing to live it.

“It was amazing. He had this voice, which sounded like the voice of a prophet – ‘I have a dream!’ I mean, the way he said it, it crept up and down your spine. ‘Where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.’ I can hear the tremor in his voice.”

Sky was so moved he later went to Selma, Ala., where he shared a pulpit with King.

“When I came back, I got very much involved with the NAACP,” he said.

Not everybody was so impressed. David Lawrence, a writer with the New York Herald Tribune, wrote a column that was published in the (Portland) Evening Express under the headline, “Washington ‘march’ marks day of public disgrace.”

He called the march “government by mob,” and complained that Washington’s “normal community life was disrupted. … American citizens were prevented from pursuing their customary ways. Their right to go to their places of employment was impaired by fear of bodily injury.”

In a letter published in the Sept. 11, 1963, Portland Press Herald, Talbot responded.

“The march on Washington will not go down in history as a disgrace,” he wrote. “But more so as the biggest step the Negro has ever taken in showing this country and the world the need for freedom, for equality, for straight first-class citizenship for everybody no matter what race or creed.”