Time March 2–9, 2020INEQUALITY| THE MARCH
you know marTin LuTher king Jr.’s “i have a Dream”
speech. Or at least you think you know it—you’ve read
about it in textbooks, or heard politicians quote from it, or
seen clips in classrooms or museums.
But chances are, you haven’t heard the full 17-minute
address from the March on Washington for Jobs and Free-
dom, and what you have heard failed to capture what made
it the one of the most famous speeches in history. Even if
you wanted to, despite its renown, it’s surprisingly hard to
find. Online clips are removed swiftly, and those that evade
detection crackle with white noise.
But this month, there will be a new way to hear the
speech. TIME is releasing The March, a virtual reality
experience that takes participants back to that day in
August 1963. The experience uses original audio, avail-
able in rare fidelity thanks to an unlikely source: Motown
Records. In its recording, King’s clarion voice carries with-
out the distracting echo picked up by inferior attempts to
capture it. Spectators on the steps of the Lincoln Memo-
rial chime in audibly as King proceeds through his remarks,
making listeners feel as if they’re 10 ft. from the podium.
Crucially, the recording, which is also slated for rerelease for
audiences today, challenges long-held notions about that
day—and its story reveals King’s struggles over how best
to share his words with the world.
The speech’s journey to its place in history began
months before the March on Washington. In Birming-
ham, Ala., in the spring of 1963, King led a series of pro-
tests against segregation that were brutally met by attack
dogs, fire hoses and arrests. While in jail there, King wrote
his “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” which quickly became
an essential treatise for civil rights. His resilience—and the
national coverage the protests garnered—led to the legal,
if not de facto, desegregation of the city, and solidified his
place on the program at the August event.
“If [Dr. King] had failed in Birmingham, no one would
have asked him to give the concluding speech at the March
on Washington,” says Clayborne Carson, a Stanford histo-
rian and editor of King’s autobiography. “After Birming-
ham, no one would have wanted to follow him.”
Meanwhile in Detroit, Motown Re-
cords was making waves as a rising
power house of black excellence. At a
time when there were few black exec-
utives in the music industry, founder
Berry Gordy had shepherded the rise
of a factory- line production model that
saw songs like the Miracles’ “You’ve
Really Got a Hold on Me” and the Mar-
velettes’ “Please Mr. Postman” ascend the
charts. Until that point, Gordy had mostly
stayed away from activist causes. “I never
wanted Motown to be a mouthpiece for
civil rights,” he tells TIME in an email.
He had conceived Motown as a force for
utopian integration— the “sound of young
America,” not just of black Americans—
and he saw the label’s economic success
as a statement in itself.
But he was intrigued by King’s non-
violent credo and had reached out to him
in 1962 about recording his speeches. “I
saw Motown much like the world he was
fighting for—people of all races and re-
ligions, working together harmoniously
for a common goal,” Gordy says.
King was wary. When a poorly re-
corded bootleg of one of his speeches,
Martin Luther King at Zion Hill, had been
released that year, he was dismayed that
a speech he didn’t consider particularly
polished was being distributed nation-
ally. The Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC) filed a court injunc-
tion to prevent sales of the record, which
ultimately cost more to produce than it
recouped in sales.
King had another reason to be skep-
tical of Motown: he disapproved of the
secularized brand of church music that
was the label’s specialty. “The profoundA dream restored
THE SOUND OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT, LIKE IT’S NEVER BEEN HEARD BEFORE
BY ANDREW R. CHOW
JOINING
FORCES
From left, Berry
Gordy and
Martin Luther
King Jr. hold
King’s first
Motown album
next to Lena
Horne and Billy
Taylor in Atlanta
in 1963