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Emancipation 2013: Field Negroes Needed

50th Anniversary of the March on Washington

Emancipation 2013: Field Negroes Needed

By N Oji Mzilikazi

Originally published in the Montreal Community Contact Volume 23, Number 17 August 22, 2013           

Won’t you help to sing

These songs of freedom

Cause all I’ve ever had redemption songs

All I’ve ever had redemption songs

These songs of freedom

Songs of freedom

— Redemption Song

— Bob Marley

August 28, 1963, was a momentous day in the history of America, and Black people everywhere. On that day, hundreds of thousands of people; men women, children, Blacks, whites, Jews, gays and lesbians, marched on Washington in the most significant protest of the civil rights era.

It was on that day, there in Washington; on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I have a dream” speech, inarguable one of the greatest 20 Century speeches.

King’s speech prompted William Sullivan, the FBI’s assistant director of domestic intelligence, to recommend: “We must mark him [King] now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous negro of the future of this nation.”…