Decades Later, Dream Resounds

Residents, Visitors Recall or Imagine King's Washington Moments

The Rev. Walter E. Fauntroy, a fellow civil rights activist and friend of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., prays during a service at the Tenth Street Baptist Church in honor of King, one of several events marking the holiday throughout the region. Story, B1. (By Michael Robinson Chavez -- The Washington Post)

On the same marble steps where the minister once thundered those words -- "Free at last! Free at last!" -- a cold wind scoured across the Potomac, swirled the brittle leaves and passed over a small engraving on a slab of stone.

"I Have A Dream. Martin Luther King Jr. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. August 28, 1963."

You might walk right over it if you didn't stop to look. Yesterday morning, again and again at the Lincoln Memorial, people found it.

A jogger in a wool hat ran up the steps, knelt and touched the stone. A woman lined up her toes with the words and stood tall, as if on a podium, and scanned the imaginary crowd. A young boy held up his hand and deepened his voice like that of a preacher: "I have a dream."

From his booth selling patches and pins, Darnell Rorie, 46, has seen this many times.

"They're trying to picture the people being out there," said Rorie, who has volunteered at the booth for three years to help a friend from church. "All those people."

Rorie was 3 when King gave that speech, a kid in Northeast Washington who grew up with certain indelible images:

"Back then, you'd turn on the TV and look at them getting water-hosed . . . dogs biting people, people beating people," he said. "And King's talking about a peaceful method, when we're constantly getting beat up. As I got older, I can see a lot of things that he was saying. Eventually, love is going to conquer hate."

At this point, on the 20th anniversary of the federal holiday for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., there is no grand memorial to him in the nation's capital -- although one is being planned. But there are places he inhabited briefly, where he walked or slept, led marches or spoke to crowds.

He strolled with President John F. Kennedy in the Rose Garden of the White House and marched arm-in-arm through the slums of Shaw. He addressed 4,000 people at the Cardozo High School stadium in March 1967, and a year later, four days before he was killed, spoke at Washington National Cathedral about his campaign to bear witness to poverty, which brought thousands of poor people to live in tents on the Mall.

He had two favorite restaurants in Washington: the Florida Avenue Grill, in the shadow of Howard University, and Wings 'N Things, which stood along 14th Street NW, said the Rev. Walter E. Fauntroy, his friend and fellow civil rights leader.

But the city was, for King, primarily a place of business.