Organized by the Consolidated Economic Development Corp. and the Albany-Dougherty chapter of the NAACP, “A Campaign for One Society” was held at the Charles Sherrod Civil Rights Park to mark the day that is best remembered by Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream Speech.”
“One of the things we should recognize on this day that President John F. Kennedy tried to censor the words of Martin Luther King and John Lewis, on this very day a black man has been nominated as a candidate for president,” event organizer William Wright said. “This says to us that we need to take a look at where we were, where we are now and where we have to go.”
Local leaders Kenneth Cutts, who represented Congressman Sanford Bishop, Mayor Pro-Tem Jon Howard and County Commissioner John Hayes offered greetings before presentations by Wright, Albany-Dougherty NAACP President Marvin Jones, Arthur Williams, George Hawethorne and Willie “Dee” Parker.
While acknowledging the advancements of blacks that the March on Washington helped bring about, the speakers warned that there was still much to be done.
“Things that happened in the ’60s still happen today, not blatantly but subtly,” Jones said. “We cannot be fooled and lured into a comfort zone. There are still a lot of mountains to be climbed.”
Former Albany City Commissioner Williams noted the deplorable condition of the Civil Rights monument in the park, which is discolored and surrounded by weeds, and demanded that the park “be fixed today or this week.”
“We’re being rope-a-doped,” Williams said. “Yes, we’ve accomplished things, but we’ve accomplished them against all odds. We’ve progressed, but when put on a scale of mediation, we’re just as far (from equality) today as we were when I was a child.
“Because of the March on Washington and other events, we have our ‘c-i-v-i-l’ civil rights, but we lost our ‘s-i-l-v-e-r’ silver rights, our economic base. And to those who are trying to push consolidation on this community, if it’s not to save money, it must be for diluting our voting strength.”
Hawethorne told of atrocities he witnessed as a young man in Albany.
“I watched black women and men whipped with clubs by police on the streets,” he said. “I played pool with Dr. King right over there in that pool room — and he beat everybody; he could shoot some pool — and he said ‘I knew I would have to fight whites in Albany, Georgia, but I didn’t know I was going to have to fight blacks, too.”
Parker, who gave an accounting of the events on the day of the 1963 march, said King’s speech was still relevant.
“Those words — ‘I have a dream’ — were so powerful,” she said. “But today we have to live past the dream. We have to stay united if we want to one day sing the old Negro spiritual ‘free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, I’m free at last’.”
