Time March 2–9, 2020INEQUALITY| THE MARCH
sacred and spiritual meaning of the great
music of the church must never be mixed
with the transitory quality of rock and roll
music,” King, who was himself a minis-
ter, wrote in an advice column in Ebony
magazine in 1958. “The former serves to
lift men’s souls to higher levels of reality,
and therefore to God; the latter so often
plunges men’s minds into degrading and
immoral depths.”
But as soul music became institutional-
ized, King would come to see how it might
be useful to him. In 1967 he spoke to black
DJs at a convention, telling them, “School
integration is much easier now that they
share a common music, a common lan-
guage, and enjoy the same dances.”
So in June 1963, King allowed Mo-
town to record a speech in Detroit. An
estimated 125,000 people attended the
rally, which raised money for the SCLC
and would come to be known as the Walk
to Freedom. While now overshadowed
by the March on Washington, the speech
King gave at Cobo Hall includes the re-
frain “I have a dream” in cascading waves
of conviction, presaging what would be-
come one of the most enduring lines of
the 20th century.
The Detroit speech would be Mo-
town’s first foray into both spoken-word
recording and the civil rights movement
more broadly. In August, Gordy traveled
to an SCLC benefit concert in Atlanta to
meet King and present him with a copy
of the album. It was around this time
that the two reached a handshake deal
for Motown to record King’s Washing-
ton speech the following week.
BuT while King and Gordy were
reaching an arrangement, the march’s
organizers were forging a deal of their
own. They had agreed to give exclusive
recording rights to WRVR, a radio sta-
tion based out of New York City’s River-
side Church. News outlets flocked to the
march to get their own versions too. The
resulting confusion meant many micro-
phones were near when King, 11 minutes
in, went off script. After a planned sec-
tion that likened segregation to a “bad
check,” King cast aside his papers and
launched into a new theme that would
include this indelible line: “I have a
dream that my four little children will
one day live in a nation where they will
not be judged by the color of their skin
but by the content of their character.”
The speech was an instant classic,
and it only grew in stature throughout
that summer and fall. King made sure it
was copyrighted from the start. But as
its prestige increased, so did the number
of recordings that began cropping up
without permission—and without roy-
alty deals that would benefit civil rights
causes. King’s lawyer Clarence Jones, in
his book Behind the Dream, wrote that
he would walk into record stores to find
unauthorized versions of the speech
on full blast. “As Martin’s lawyer and
friend, I had a duty to pursue legal re-
course as soon as I got my hands on the
records,” he wrote.
In October 1963, King filed a lawsuit
against three recording companies, in-
cluding Motown, to stop the spread of the
speech and demand proceeds from any
earlier sales in order to protect its legacy
and more closely manage the use of his
already famous words.
The lawsuit sent Gordy into a bewil-
dered panic. In a hastily typed Oct. 14
telegram riddled with typos, Gordy
pledged to stand down if necessary, writ-THE SOUND OF AMERICA Stevie Wonder, left, with Marvin Gaye in a Motown studio in
Detroit in 1965. Founder Berry Gordy came to see the label as a force for integrationing, “The Motown Record Corporation is
more concerned with the unity ov [sic]
civil rights organizations and the prog-
ress of the negro in American [sic] than
it is with the sale of a single record album.
“We were told by attorney Clarence
Jones that the combined council would
go along with the release of our album,”
he wrote. “If this is not true we will re-
move our album from the marked [sic]
immediately.”
A few days later, Motown was
dropped from the lawsuit. An article
in Billboard on Oct. 19 explained that
Jones had not known of the agreement
between King and Gordy when the
suit was filed. The album hit the mar-
ket as planned, with royalties flowing
to the SCLC. King and Jones eventually
reached additional deals with 20th Cen-
tury Fox and Folkways to release their
own records. The “official” WRVR ver-
sion was also released, but only about
5,000 copies were pressed because of
another, unrelated legal case.
The confusion over the recording from
the march did not deter Gordy from his
devotion to civil rights causes. MotownGIL
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