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I am not often glad to be as old as I am. But I consider it a special privilege to be old enough to have heard Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream Speech” when he delivered it. It was the August before my first year of college. I didn’t attend the March on Washington, but I did watch it on television. These many years later I still feel the power of that event in my very bones.

I confess that as a teenager I had been more absorbed in my own life than being involved in issues of social justice. I knew of course about the civil rights movement. Living in the south you had to. Protests were everywhere. A sit-in had been held at Patterson’s Drugstore in my hometown to protest its segregated lunch counter. Lynchburg public schools had actually already started inching toward integration, but not without opposition, especially from the editorial page of the local newspaper. It was relentless in its attacks on “communist leaning” black leaders bent on stirring up trouble throughout the south. But the paper’s most vicious editorials were aimed at the outside agitator named Martin Luther King, Jr. who the editor was convinced was an avowed communist trying to destroy America.

I didn’t know what to think when I actually thought about what was going on. Then I heard the “I Have A Dream Speech.” I had never heard anyone speak like that before. Even for a teenager like me Dr. King was captivating. It was like barely paying attention as you hear someone talking, but as you continue to listen you find yourself being drawn in more and more to what is being said until you are feeding on every word. When he ended with those immortal words, “Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last,” I remember sitting in silence awe struck by what I had just witnessed.

The editor of the paper didn’t have the same reaction. He wrote a blistering criticism of the speech and the March. And he never let up. In fact, a year after his assassination that same editor was still trying to prove Martin Luther King had been a communist. That said to me then and says to me now that some people do not care about truth, some people do not care about justice, some people do not care about the common good, some people do not care about anything but what they believe, ever how untrue or removed from reality it may be.

That is why 50 years after the March on Washington we are once again seeing politicians with considerable public support advocating a return to the days when whites enjoyed rights and privileges people of color didn’t have. But they have more to contend with now than their predecessors did. Gay Americans have come out of the closet and are demanding equal rights as well. Not surprisingly they are encountering a similar kind of refusal by whites – and even some blacks – to grant them full citizenship. It’s as if we didn’t learn anything as a people when we went through this struggle in the 50’s and 60’s.

But you know what? Those people determined to protect their privileges at the expense of others are going to lose the same way those before them lost. They are winning some of the battles at the moment, but they are not going to win the war for human rights, for civil rights, for what is right. The old south lost the civil war and then lost the war to maintain segregation, and the new south will suffer a similar kind of defeat. So be assured North Carolina, Texas, and copy cat states, you are on the losing end of this battle as you were before. The arch of history will bend toward justice this time as it always has, and your grandchildren will look back on your actions and wonder once again what in the world you were thinking when you did what you did.

A 50th anniversary celebration, then, of the great March on Washington is in order. On August 28th we will remember an event that changed America. We will recall words that thrilled most of us and inspired some of us who had been on the sidelines to get into the struggle. We may feel sadness as we wonder what might have been had certain tragedies not happened. But when the day is done we will be more determined than ever to continue the work of freedom and justice for all. And we will prevail. We shall overcome…because we still have Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream.