Clifford Bell could not catch every word. He was in a thick crowd around the reflecting pool in Washington, D.C., doing his best to hear the amplified voice of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as it rolled across an audience almost as large as today’s entire population of Buffalo.
Yet something in that 1963 delivery to more than 250,000 people – in conscience, force and sheer love – went straight to Bell’s core. In later days and months, by film or article, he would come to appreciate every sentence in King’s March on Washington speech, eternally known by four words:
I have a dream.
“This was a congregation,” said Bell – “Brother Bell” to generations in Buffalo, a community extension of his presence in the church – wrapping together a kind of grace that united the crowd, Black and white.
The violent history of legal or de facto racism, of Jim Crow segregation, “could get people discouraged because it seemed your efforts weren’t getting you anywhere,” Bell said.
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At that moment, for so many weary or scarred from the long struggle, denominations did not matter: With that speech, Bell said, King “reinforced our faith.”
That was 60 years ago Monday. Bell was 33, and in the dry cleaning business. He and John Mayo, a close friend then and now, climbed on one of the buses lined up by the Buffalo branch of the NAACP.
The two men recall traveling all night, eating packed lunches, in order to be there on time.
“Just amazing,” Bell said, “to see so many people, in so many directions.”
In 1956, at a celebration at the old Statler Hotel for the 50th anniversary of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, 27-year-old Martin Luther King inspired the crowd in a speech, “The Birth of a New
The prevailing atmosphere, Bell and Mayo said, was warm respect. Mayo, 93, of Grand Island, recalled how he and Bell “always liked to sing,” and joined in waves of song from the crowd.
The solidarity – the proximity of so many African Americans and whites in common cause, fraternity magnified by memorable speakers – gave Mayo “shivers,” he said.
He went home believing the nation had “turned a corner,” that the march would signal profound change. “It wasn’t to be,” he said. “We had not solved the problem.”
In Buffalo, the new Kensington Expressway was hammering through established neighborhoods of color. It remained difficult if not impossible for Black families to move into too many historically white communities. Children in predominately African American schools still faced a harsh climb with education, with good health, with barriers in many professions.
Sixty years later, that jarring contrast is what shapes Mayo’s memory.
The two old friends were familiar with King’s work for civil rights long before they made that bus trip to Washington. What Bell could not anticipate was how the speech, intertwined with coming struggles – and enshrined by the grief of King’s assassination in 1968 – would shape and propel Bell’s own life, to this day.
He would serve for 12 years on Buffalo’s Common Council, and in several civic roles involving key economic counsel and direction for small businesses trying to succeed in the city. Even now, King’s legacy in Buffalo remains Bell’s ongoing mission:
For 30 years, he chaired the city’s annual Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. celebration, and he was at the center of a community effort to build a King memorial at the city park named in his honor.
Fifteen months ago, Buffalo was traumatized by the 2022 Tops massacre – the racist murder of 10 people at the Jefferson Avenue Tops Markets by a killer whom investigators say was radicalized by internet poison. The assault laid bare how neighborhoods at the city’s heart continue to suffer from segregation and deprivation, a stark fact of life 60 years after King’s speech.
Bell’s resolve, at 93, is to accelerate his efforts. He is deeply involved in a “Together As One” initiative, for instance, that will weave together cultural, educational and historic presentations during February’s Black History Month.
As for King’s speech – with such calls as to “hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope” – Bell said it ties into his fundamental makeup:
“Keep up the fight. Don’t quit. Keep it going.”
Lynne Williams, of Cheektowaga, speaks of a sense of how her own hope from the march, while tempered, still endures: Raised in a white family in the Bronx, she journeyed to the march with some passionate New York University students that included her then-boyfriend – only days before she began college at then-Buffalo State College.
“There was an overwhelming sense of joy and forward movement,” she said, a feeling challenged when she experienced violence and heard ugly taunts in later marches.
If the South defined Rep. John Lewis' role in history, those who knew him best say his view of human possibility was shaped by a childhood moment when he stepped out of his uncle's car in this city, on North Division Street, writes Sean Kirst.
What she hangs onto from 1963, she said, is the belief “we were on the cusp of something great, something overwhelming, that would change everybody’s lives.”
In Buffalo, Judson Price — a young teacher in 1963 — could not make it to the march. Looking back on it at 92, he said one of the most resonating impacts was the appearance of compelling, high-profile examples of courage and aspiration to African American children who too often saw no faces like their own in places of mainstream authority.
“It built a lot of morale,” said Price, a friend of Bell’s for at least 80 years and a community activist who helped found Buffalo’s Juneteenth celebration. The jubilance flowing from the march was replaced by the grinding truth, Price said, that change remains “slow, slow, slow.”
The speech is also on the mind of Willie Lee “Sis” Carter Whitaker of Niagara Falls. Certainly she remembers King’s words, but she has another powerful reason for vivid memories of that time:
She is a first cousin of the late John Lewis. In 1963, Lewis spoke at the march as 23-year-old chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He would later endure a fractured skull in a 1965 beating by state troopers at Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, rising from that ordeal to become a revered American figure who died in 2020, while serving in Congress.
Lewis had close family ties to Buffalo: His uncles, O.C. and Dink Carter, raised in Troy, Ala., both settled in this city. Many relatives – including Whitaker, a first cousin – made a similar journey, part of the Great Migration of African Americans who left oppressive conditions in the South for what they hoped would be opportunity in Northern cities.
Lewis visited Buffalo as an 11-year-old, barely a decade before he spoke in Washington. He would later describe the instant when he arrived at the home his uncles shared on North Division Street, offering an almost unimaginable perspective for a child from rigidly enforced segregation:
“When we reached (their) house, I couldn’t believe it,” Lewis wrote in “March: Book One,” an autobiographical graphic novel. “They had white people living next door to them. On both sides.”
A fierce impatience with injustice meshed into his cry for equality and humanity at the march. He spoke of countless thousands, locked down by pain and struggle, who had no way to be there. He spoke of police beatings and “starvation wages,” of Black Americans who could lose everything by seeking the simple chance to vote:
“We must say: ‘Wake up America! Wake up!’ For we cannot stop, and we will not and cannot be patient.”
In 1963, Whitaker was a high school student in Troy. As historian David Greenberg wrote in Sunday’s New York Times, the Lewis speech “bluntly assailed deficiencies in the civil rights bill others were championing – but … succeeded in doing so without undermining the day’s unity.”
Whitaker said her family knew of Lewis’ speech but had to discuss it quietly. “We were fearful for him and proud of him,” she said of Lewis, the cousin she and many relatives will always call “Robert,” his middle name.
Speaking out like he did, they knew, could get you killed. The idea that Lewis’ own family could not fully embrace his role in such a moment was part of the reason that Whitaker’s daughter, Niagara Falls native Kimberly Whitaker, went to Washington on Saturday to join a march commemorating the anniversary.
Kimberly is director of operations for the nonprofit John R. Lewis Legacy Institute, created by a group of relatives to work toward social justice, equity in education and health awareness, in Lewis’ memory.
She knew and loved Lewis as a regular attendee at family reunions, even before she learned his historical magnitude. Kimberly, now a case manager for an Atlanta law firm, said she was thinking of her mom and other relatives Saturday, how in 1963 they had to nurture “secret pride” in Lewis because speaking openly put them at such risk.
In that sense, she was there both as proof of what his pain helped to change, and of so much left to do.