Martin Luther King on Education - I Have a Dream

Martin Luther King had a dream to destroy Jim Crow.

Martin Luther King, I Have a Dream, Lincoln Memorial

Martin Luther King delivered his I Have a Dream Speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 before an audience of more than two hundred thousand. I Have a Dream was a speech that was developed over many years, starting when Martin Luther King joined the Montgomery Bus Boycott, sparked by Rosa Parks in 1955. 

The I Have a Dream Speech was a culmination of struggles that had been endured by, not just the man--Martin Luther King--but all African Americans. At the heart of the civil rights struggle were several civil rights that African Americans were prevented from enjoying. One of those crucial civil rights being denied by Jim Crow laws was an equal education. In fact, education in the African American community was not only unequal to that of whites, but it was inferior on its own. School supplies were lacking in black schools, teachers were under-trained in many cases and building facilities were without adequate space and even proper lighting and heating.

Martin Luther King - Lincoln University 1961

So, you see, the Civil Rights movement was about more than ridding the American vocabulary of the "N" word. Civil rights were about equal education and equality in all aspect of American life where rights for African Americans and other people of color were systematically denied. 

Equality in society cannot be attained without equal education.

The African American community from the time it was freed from slavery pushed their children to get as much education as possible. It was the belief of the black community that equal rights could only be gained through education. The uneducated, they believed, would always be relegated to unequal circumstances and poverty. 

Many African American families sacrificed to send their children to school and to college. They paid for tuition, textbooks and school supplies with meager earnings as farm workers, domestic help and common laborers. Martin Luther King, however, had advantages of security as a child with a prosperous father to support him and his siblings. In cases, like his, it was understood that the children would attend college. This meant room and board, train or bus transportation and school clothing.

Introduced during slavery, Jim Crow laws and black codes prohibited the instruction of bonded laborers in letters and numbers. Educated slaves, the owners believed, would no longer accept their status and possible would rebel. After emancipation, landowners who controlled sharecroppers in a similar manner as slaves, held the same beliefs. Although it was no longer against the law to educate former slaves, the economic system certainly discouraged their education. Jim Crow schools were designated separate but equal, a concept that had no meaning when it came to equality. Martin Luther King was an educated man who preached education for all. 

Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King arrested for disorderly conduct in Montgomery, Alabama.

Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King
Arrest Photos 1954

In fact, in many areas of the United States, Jim Crow laws did not provide for or require African American children to attend school. Education was thought to pollute the cheap workforce, making laborers desire a better life. Rosa Parks had to walk many miles to school as a child, even passing a white school whose students were bused from home.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott, which was ignited by Rosa Parks in 1954 and lasted for more than a year, hurled Martin Luther King, as a young pastor, into the national arena during. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was not just about maids and janitors getting to work without riding the bus. There were many students involved in the boycott walking miles to school instead of continued to be humiliated on public transportation. This was a movement within the larger Civil Rights Movement and helped energize the growing national struggle against Jim Crow laws. 

Martin Luther King’s Education and Credentials

Martin Luther King was educated when he became a civil rights activist against Jim Crow laws during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, sparked by Rosa Parks.

Martin Luther King &Jim Crow Laws

I watched Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, civil rights and the dismantling of Jim Crow laws unfold on the evening news on television along with every other American household that had a television in their living room.

Martin Luther King - March on Washington &The Dream

See full video of Martin Luther King's 'I Have A Dream,' written after Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and ignited the modern Civil Rights Movement against Jim Crow laws.

Martin Luther King: Dream Speech

Read full text of Martin Luther King's 'I Have A Dream,' written after Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and ignited the modern Civil Rights Movement against Jim Crow laws.

Sunny Nash

Blogger, Sunny Nash, is a writer, producer, photographer and leading author on race relations in America. 

Sunny Nash produces blogs, media, books, articles and images on history and contemporary topics, from slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow and civil rights to post racism, social media, entertainment and technology using her book, Bigmama Didn’t Shop At Woolworth’s, as a basis for commentary and research.

Bigmama Didn't Shop 

at Woolworth's

by Sunny Nash
Hardcover & Kindle

Sunny Nash's book was selected by the Association of American University Press as a resource for understanding U.S. race relations and recommended for Native American Collections by the Miami-Dade Public Library System.

"My book, 'Bigmama Didn't Shop At Woolworth's,' began in the 1990s. I was writing for Hearst and Knight-Ridder newspapers. The stories are about my childhood with my part-Comanche grandmother, Bigmama, my parents, relatives, friends, and others; and my interpretation of the events surrounding the Jim Crow South before and during the Civil Rights Movement.

Robin Fruble of Southern California said, "Every white person in America should read this book! Sunny Nash writes the story of her childhood without preaching or ranting but she made me realize for the first time just how much skin color changes how one experiences the world. But if your skin color is brown, it matters a great deal to a great number of people. I needed to learn that. Sunny Nash is a great teacher," Fruble said.

© 2014 Sunny Nash. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

www.sunnynash.blogspot.com

~Thank You~

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Take Five - In Memory of Dave Brubeck

The Dave Brubeck
Anthology - Music Book

On summer evenings in the 1950s and 1960s when the air inside the kitchen was too stifling to turn on the stove and cook a meal, my mother made cold-cut suppers outdoors with the music of her favorite jazz artists lilting out of the house into the fading light of day and blending into her candlelit table setting.

This is how my mother made my life seem like a luxury, instead of the drudgery most people simply accepted. 

Outdoor Entertainment at Littie's was necessary because there was no indoor air conditioning. These were my family's evenings out and sometimes we had overnight company, traveling relatives or friends passing through town. At that time, there were no restaurant or hotel accommodations for black people, except ill-equipped, insect-infested flop-house rooms above nightclubs. My mother would never expose guests to rooms where sheets had never been laundered.or restaurants with rear Jim Crow entrances or walk-up windows to order food to be eaten while standing on the street. That was just not acceptable to her. 

To complete evenings out, my mother brought out music to play on a record changer she had bought at a yard sale. She connected her new electronic music device to a power source in the kitchen, set the box on a chair just inside the back door and put on her favorite music--Dave Brubeck--while she decorated the backyard for supper. 

"You can make your life better with a little effort," she said. "I already have the world out there screaming at me what I can and cannot do for a living; where I can and cannot sit in a restaurant; where I can and cannot live! Why would I want to come home from the job they do let me have and listen to a guy whining how bad life is to the sound of an out-of-tune guitar," she would say. I guess that music was too sad, reminding her of the Jim Crow realities under which we lived, at that time, and making her feel worse than the world already made her feel. 

"I do not need someone crying loud and yelling about a broken heart or a life gone wrong," my mother would say about Blues and Country Music, she wrote songs herself that were very much country. "I can look up the street and find real examples of failed love lives! I want to hear music that gives me hope and lightens my spirit." Dave Brubeck's song, Take Five, from his album, Time Out,  really lifted my mother's spirits after she went right out and bought it as soon as the studio released the music in 1959.

 Time Out

Essential Dave Brubeck

My mother's motto was, take five-- take time to enjoy yourself. Taking five always included the Dave Brubeck Quartet or some other of her favorite jazz artists who played "sweet and soft."

Listening to Brubeck's music allowed my mother and me to exchange feelings of sadness with feelings of joy. 

Dave Brubeck Quartet Take Five

Paul Desmond, Saxophone

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Just like my mother tried to make life better by creating her own fine restaurant in the backyard and playing her favorite music, all of America was yearning for hope during the 1950s and 1960s. Life under Jim Crow laws could make one feel pretty oppressed and I imagine the oppressor's burden was getting heavy, too. Although we all saw the changes over the horizon, the changes were yet to be fully realized.

All Deliberate Speed: 
Reflections on the 
First Half-Century 
of Brown v. Board 
of Education

When the Supreme Court decided Brown v the Board of Education in 1954, my mother thought the schools would be integrated and, finally, I would be issued new school books. 

When this was not the case, we all waited, patiently and some impatiently. And nothing changed. Long after the Court ordered school desegregation with aIl deliberate speed, I continued my education in a segregated school system using hand-me-down books from the white school until I graduated from high school ten years later. And ten years later and even today, we are all still the Offspring of Jim Crow. When their books were replaced, the black schools got them, marked up, pages missing and bindings loose. Then some of our teachers used books to play favorites, giving their pets the best of them. 

Best of Kenny Burrell
 (Guitar Recorded 
Versions)

Best of Paul Desmond

I could not use tattered books as an excuse. My mother never accepted that. "You have books," she said. "That's more than your ancestors had on the plantation! Now, go to your room and do your homework." 

My mother expected me to graduate from college one day and those books were all my school had to prepare me.

There was never any use arguing with my mother. She had all the answers, it seemed. So, I dragged those old beat-up books home from school every day and studied under her watchful eye while listening to the music of Dave Brubeck or Kenny Burrell or some other favorite jazz or classical artist of hers in the background.

My mother's mother, Bigmama who lived with us, had a brother, a school teacher in Houston. His wife was a traveling book and music seller, on the road sometimes seven days a week with a statewide route that included our town. Our great aunt stopped often at our house for a meal when she was in town and sometimes slept overnight 

Due to the lack of restaurants and hotels available to this black traveling sales executive, we became part of her accommodations network, providing evenings outdoors with delicious food and conversation about books, music, politics and current events; and listening to the latest jazz and classical music albums that she also sold from the back of her car to supplement her income. This was possible because, like most small towns in the 1950s, ours had The Record Shop downtown, a dark, dusty, dingy little hole in the wall that did not carry jazz or classical music and did not sell sheet  music, which I needed for my piano lessons. 

My mother also ordered my sheet music and her jazz and classical music recordings from our great aunt. She also bought lots of other product from our great aunt on installment plans, such as a set of reference books, because my school's encyclopedia were outdated and the public library was segregated. My mother bought subscriptions to national magazines, newspapers, journals and other periodicals like National Geographic. 

My father always wanted to know where my mother got all the money to make those purchases. She replied, "I manage."

After breakfast the next morning, before our great aunt left to continue her sales route to the next county, she gave my mother discontinued music recordings and book samples she no longer needed for display and demonstrations, which my mother eagerly added to our shelves. 

Our aunt made quite a good living for a number of years until record clubs and book-of-the-month deals in the backs of magazine ruined her business. It was just as well, she said. It had been a hard job for a woman. In fact, she was the only woman I knew who was a traveling salesman. Although she had a college education, professional jobs outside of the classroom for black women in her generation were scarce. When she and our uncle retired, I spent weekends with them in Houston. Over the years, the childless couple had amassed a small fortune and lived very well in a black upscale Houston neighborhood.

Books, newspapers, photo essays and television helped change U.S. race relations. 

Rosa Parks
by Rosa Parks
& James Haskins

Rosa Parks had started the year-long Montgomery Bus Boycott and Dr. Martin Luther King soared to national prominence one year after Brown v the Board of Education failed to change the Jim Crow American educational system. And, again, I have to admit, there was little immediate change.

The Supreme Court said one thing and the American people said and did another. Some black Americans waited for others like Martin Luther King to test the new laws regarding U.S. race relations that had replaced Jim Crow and other black families sued districts, cities and states in efforts to receive equal access to better schools. People of all races were afraid of what was about to happen to their ways of life. 

School districts hired attorneys to guide them through the postponement game to avoid court rulings on a slew of Landmark Cases Affecting Jim Crow Laws in American Education. In the meanwhile, things stayed the same. For another decade, there were people in the United States of America who were not allowed to vote and there were still colored and white only signs at the movies, in waiting rooms and other places around the nation.

Their Last Time Out
BY DAVE BRUBECK

When I was growing up, my mother exposed me to a world far different from the Jim Crow world in which we lived. She created a library in our house, took me on trips, sent me to ballet and piano lessons and took me to galleries and museums 100 miles away on a Greyhound Bus. 

In her planning for my education, the music of Dave Brubeck and other similar music figured in prominently. She believed this music along with classical selections would improve my mind by calming my thoughts while I studied my lessons in those hand-me-down books. And it worked. I became one of the first black women to graduate from Texas A&M University and I made the Dean's List several semesters while listening to the music that became the ambiance of my life. 

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Bigmama Didn’t Shop 

At Woolworth’s 

Sunny Nash

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Bigmama Didn't Shop 

at Woolworth's

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Bigmama Didn't Shop 

at Woolworth's

Sunny Nash

Sunny Nash is an author, producer, photographer and leading writer on U.S. race relations. She writes books, blogs, articles and reviews, and produces media and images on U.S. history and contemporary American topics, ranging from Jim Crow laws to social media networking. Sunny Nash is the author of Bigmama Didn't Shop At Woolworth's (Texas A&M University Press), about life with her part-Comanche grandmother during the Civil Rights Movement.

Sunny Nash’s book is recognized by the Association of American University Presses as essential for understanding U.S. race relations. Nash's book is also listed in the Bibliographic Guide for black studies at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York; and recommended for Native American collections by the Miami-Dade Public Library System in Florida. Nash uses her book to write articles and blogs on race relations in America through topics relating to her life--from music, film, early radio and television, entertainment, social media, Internet technology, publishing, journalism, sports, education, employment, the military, fashion, performing arts, literature, women's issues, adolescence and childhood, equal rights, social and political movements--past and present—to today's post-racism.

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© 2014 Sunny Nash. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
 www.sunnynash.blogspot.com 

~Thank You~

Jim Crow Laws & the Stage Mother

School, music and movies prepare for success.



Sunny Nash
8 Years Old, from
Bigmama Didn't Shop
At Woolworth's

After my singing debut, my mother became my music director, companion, confidant, partner and co-conspirator when we were pursuing a dream of mine or hers, mostly hers.

There was no You Tube when I was eight years old in third grade at Booker T. Washington Elementary School. My music teacher, Eloise King, discovered that I could sing the old-fashioned way. I knew I could sing along with the radio but I never thought I was good enough to impress my music teacher. And I had no idea singing would be part of my education.

I saw her walking up and down the aisle during music class listening as the we sang lines from an arrangement she had chosen. On one of her strolls down the aisle, she stopped close to me and stood there for a few moments and then asked me to sing the song without the group. 

Back then, in addition to there being no You Tube, there were no American Idol, The Voice or America's Got Talent. 

I was afraid, thinking I was singing the song out of tune or something, which I didn't have to worry about singing with my radio. Then she asked if I would come to the auditorium at recess. I did. She told me she wanted me to sing a solo at the Spring Festival. That was the last recess for me throughout most of my remaining elementary school days. When other teachers saw me on that stage, they started making plans for me as well. If it wasn't Mrs. King rehearsing a new musical selection with me, it was Mr. Pruitt's gymnastics team or Mrs. Jackson preparing a dance routine that required new steps, elaborate makeup, which I was otherwise not allowed to wear, and vintage jewelry, which I was.

The next day, Mrs. King began teaching me the music to the Academy Award-winning song, Over the Rainbow, from the 1939 film, Wizard of Oz, instructing me to sing it exactly like the Judy Garland recording, which she sent home with me to practice before returning to school. I was already familiar with the music because I had seen the film numerous times when my mother took me to the movies whenever it encored at our Jim Crow movie theater in the 1950s or was rebroadcast on local television. Singing along with the music on the recording was different from my singing along with the radio. With the radio, I was just having fun. Singing with the recording was serious business. It would have been so much easier if You Tube had been around.

Sometimes, for television broadcasts of movies like Wizard of Oz and other shows, my mother made large bowls of popcorn to pass around our living room for the crowd of neighborhood kids and adults, who did not have television and, some of whom, had never been to the movies, a weekly trek for my mother and me. We saw all the latest movies that came to the Palace Theater downtown. My mother was as enthusiastic about movies as she was about school, books, radio, television and music, and we had plenty of books, and jazz and classical music in the house, and a revolving series of modern electronic technology on which to listen.

My mother insisted that I read books, see movies, hear music and travel for exposure to a larger world than the Jim Crow world where I lived. 

My mother insisted that I dress a certain way and she strained our budget to make sure I had the appropriate wardrobe and shoes for a teenage girl in the 1960s. My cousins looked at me with envy. They thought I was pretentious, but it wasn't me. My mother dressed me. "Everything you do reveals who you are and who you want to be," she said. All of this my mother did to produce the person she wanted me to become. What she counted on was my cooperation in her plan. Doing well in school was the most important part of her plan. It all paid off when I won a beauty and talent competition and became a statewide celebrity.

We traveled on buses, trains and, when I was older, airplanes to our destinations. 

My mother took me to museums, galleries, beaches, mountain resorts, amusement parks, tourist sites, restaurants and sporting events. This was all part of my education. We left the state to visit these attractions. Jim Crow kept us out of them at home. She encouraged me to learn new games and keep up with current events that I was required to read about in our tiny home library.

I practiced the music to Over the Rainbow with the recording Mrs. King loaned me. Again and again, I tried my best to sing the song like Judy Garland. After studying the lyrics and melody and trying to stay true to the Judy Garland version, I gained a lot of confidence in my abilities. This confidence would extent to more places than on stage and my mother seemed to see something in me that she had not seen before the performance. I caught her watching as I sang along with the music and hoped she would not get the idea to find a Dorothy costume for my performance. The original Dorothy dress is now up for auction and estimated to bring between $400,000 and $600,000. Even so, back then, as much as I loved the song, I did not want to wear Dorothy's homely dress. I might as well show up at the school festival to perform the music wearing a Cowardly Lion mask to complete the outfit.I cannot imagine how many hits I would have gotten on You Tube wearing that mask.

For the night of my performance, fortunately, my mother and Mrs. King agreed that I should wear a dainty pink dress that I already owned. I stepped upon a stack of soda pop crates in front of the microphone. I was very small for my age and needed a boost. I had practiced with the microphone and amplifier several times before the performance and felt very comfortable with the electronic equipment, as if I were a real entertainer in the music business, a recording artist in a recording studio or on the radio.

Standing up there on the stage in front of the audience, I was not nervous as a full house stared at me. Mrs. King played the introductory music to the song on piano and gave me the nod. I took a deep breath silently through my nose as she had instructed and sang the song the way we had rehearsed, paying close attention to microphone technique. When I hit my high strong notes, I held my face away from the microphone to control the amount of sound going into the microphone. 

Mrs. King had told me at rehearsal, "Back off! You're going to blow out their ears!" My own ears rang with feedback, produced by a voice untrained in mic performing. By the time that rehearsal was finished, I knew how to handle my voice using a mic. Of course, stage electronics back then were nothing compared to the ear buds and mini mics modern entertainers strut around with on stage today, to mention sophisticated HD video instantly available for instant upload to YouTube. 

I sang Over the Rainbow as if the song belonged to me, instead of Judy Garland. And I knew I had nailed it as I hung onto the last note of the song before I got a standing ovation from my neighborhood friends, classmates and teachers at school. That night prepared me for many things to come in my life, including hearing my own song on the radio one day.

Mrs. King was so pleased with my performance, she gave me the Judy Garland recording as a gift. My mother, more pleased and surprised than Mrs. King, had no idea I could sing until she heard me practicing, but she was quiet about it until the performance was over. I have Mrs. King and the Judy Garland recording of the song, Over the Rainbow, in the film, Wizard of Oz, to thank for giving me the confidence that helped to shape my life.

All of my singing and seeming joy with it stunned and pleased my mother because she couldn't get me to sing a Christmas song around the tree with her. She didn't realize I had been embarrassed to sing in front of her. She had such a wonderful voice and I felt my voice was inferior to hers. Feeling that her own time for singing professionally had past, I believe it was on the night of my song, Over the Rainbow, that my mother got ideas about entering me in The Ted Mack Amateur Hour and other competitions.

Nearly a quarter century ago, Judy Garland sang the song originally. More than a half century ago, Mrs. King picked the classic for my first song on our little school stage. In 2000, the Recording Industry Association of America and the National Endowment for the Arts voted Over the Rainbow as the #1 song of the 20th Century. When I read the announcement, memories flooded back to me of my childhood. 

Popularized by the film, Wizard of Oz, produced before I was born, Over the Rainbow had been part of my life throughout my life and had a great deal to do with my education, confidence and career choices. The song Mrs. King taught me helped to bring me to the place my mother worked so hard to get me, in spit of Jim Crow Laws. 

Bigmama Didn't Shop
At Woolworth's
by Sunny Nash

In the 1990s, I began writing a newspaper column based on my life during the era of Jim Crow laws.

My mother encouraged me to change the focus to family topics, involving the experiences her mother, my part-Comanche grandmother, Bigmama. These topics still involved Jim Crow laws, but did not center on the subject of discrimination. "People have heard enough about segregation and they're tired of it," she said. "Aren't You? I know I am. Write about your family and let their lives tell the story of civil rights. That way people won't blame you for preaching to them."

My mother's tactic worked. People loved hearing stories of our lives, even when mixed with a little non-preachy racial politics of the day. Then she advised me to use the local column to build my reputation as a writer. She was right again. The local column led to a regional column, then a syndicated column and eventually gave birth to my first book, Bigmama Didn't Shop At Woolworth's (Texas A&M University Press).

My mother was delighted when this book came out. The idea that I had written about her mother and other ancestors pleased her. After one book signing, we were sitting at the kitchen table in the house where I grew up. "You're doing better than the drug dealers in the neighborhood," she said. Although, she was just guessing how much money the neighborhood drug dealers made. There were no drug dealers in the neighborhood when I was growing up and my mother was teaching me how to have good posture at the same time that she was teaching me to use power tools. Time passes. Things change.

Thank you, Littie Nash, for being my mother and taking the job so seriously. I wouldn't be who I am without you.



Sunny Nash
Bigmama Didn't
Shop At
Woolworth's

Sunny Nash has also co-authored, edited or compiled several books, written three newspaper columns, created a major photographic study and exhibition, produced and written for television, and conducted public speaking tours. “Fortunately, writing comes easy to me and I am able to produce all kinds of copy and media—movie treatments, television scripts, book manuscripts, proposals, commercial jingles, whatever a client needs,” Nash said. “I also produce video for broadcast and Internet marketing and distribution. My client list includes corporations, cities, chambers of commerce, nonprofit organizations, real estate companies and all kinds of groups and individuals, The balance for any artist is making sure their own work does not suffer, while giving the client the best work possible.”

Bigmama Didn't Shop at Woolworth's by Sunny Nash

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All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

~ Thank You~