Residents, Visitors Recall or Imagine King's Washington Moments
By Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
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.
"When he came, he came for a reason. He didn't spend personal time here. . . . He was meeting and speaking and moving. It was a rough life in a way," said Herman Bostick, King's friend and Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity brother from Morehouse College in Atlanta, who lives in District Heights. "He didn't have much, what we call, free time."
The night before his "I Have a Dream" speech, King came in late by plane from Atlanta. He gathered with his friends and fellow civil rights leaders in a suite at the Willard Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue at 14th Street NW. It was a feverish session of editing and revising. A friend in the room told a reporter at the time that King stayed up all night:
"You'd look in the margin and see as many as four or five different words in one place, where he'd crossed it out, selected another one. He was much more particular about the language than he'd ever been before."
However, the famous "dream" passage -- versions of which King had delivered earlier -- was spoken extemporaneously.
In front of the Willard, Clarence Terry, 38, helps manage the Pershing Park Ice Rink. Under knit cap and earphones, he drove the Zamboni around the ice yesterday. Terry knew that King stayed at the Willard. His first book report, as a fifth-grader at Moten Elementary School in Southeast, was about King. At 13, he marched in the first of many Martin Luther King Jr. Day parades down Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue SE, which often drew singer Stevie Wonder.
"He actually set forth a trend for me, as in well, okay, you shouldn't hate this person because they did this or did that. You should love everyone equally, treat everyone equally, respect for respect," Terry said.
This is not theoretical. Five days ago, Terry was selling tickets for the ice rink. A white family of five approached his window -- two boys, a girl, mom, dad -- then stopped, backed up and went to the next window, where a female co-worker of "light complexion" was working, he said.
"She was like, 'Well you've got to go to the other window to buy tickets.' And the little white girl said, 'We're not purchasing anything from a black man.' "
"And at that point, I just turned and looked and walked out. It's easy for me to walk away and act like I never heard it," he said.
"Racism is still there," he went on. "There are a lot of people who won't, and refuse to, let that go."
In 1965, King's "people-to-people" tour of northern cities to speak out against urban poverty and the racial unrest across the country arrived in Washington. The stop was organized by Fauntroy, a former congressman and pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church in Northwest.
"I can remember Dr. King standing on a flatbed truck at 14th and Park Road NW, and in Southeast on Wheeler Road," he said. King spoke a "message of hope for dealing with the kind of urban blight that had produced disturbances."
The next year, King led a parade of 1,000 marchers and seven bands along a 16-block route through the Northwest neighborhood of Shaw to support an urban redevelopment program for the area. "The Shaw area, here in the nation's capital, within walking distance of the central office of every major department of government, can be the live body, the laboratory, if you please, where we in fact work out . . . a unified assault on human despair and physical decay," King said in a speech at Cardozo High School.
When Shaw resident Wesley Fogle, 71, moved to Washington in the 1950s from outside Columbia, S.C., it was a search, he said, for a job and better pay: "for higher ground." Fogle said King's life, and particularly his assassination in 1968, helped him realize the stakes of the civil rights battle, that growing up in a segregated South of separate and unequal was not a necessary order.
"I thought life had to be that way. No one ever told me it didn't have to be that way," he said. "And in Washington, I began to realize it didn't have to be."
At the windswept Lincoln Memorial over the weekend, security guard Yemi Fakoia, 39, was on duty. He moved to Upper Marlboro from Nigeria two years ago and recalled watching a King documentary growing up in Lagos.
Back home, he was an architect and a contractor who wrote newspaper articles, but here he works two security guard shifts while studying construction management at Prince George's Community College.
Fakoia takes heart in King's message of perseverance, to struggle and overcome. The first day on the job, he said, he read the inscription on the monument steps and cried.
"He was a role model for all of us to follow, for blacks in America and for blacks all over the world," Fakoia said. "It was inspiring. I lose my tears, easily."
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