Witnesses to King's dream see new hope

At least 20,000 whites were among the marchers who stood on the Washington Mall that hot and sticky day 45 years ago. Many had ventured south to work for civil rights in the hamlets of Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina and Mississippi.

Cappy Harmon, 59, remembered her father, an Episcopal minister who had been jailed in North Carolina, loading her two sisters and her mother into a Volkswagen bus and driving south from Roxbury, Mass.

“It was one of those times when it was very clear what was right and what was wrong,” Ms. Harmon said.

The years to come offered less clarity. The civil rights movement fractured, Dr. King was assassinated, and Ms. Harmon, who works at Atlanta Habitat for Humanity, spoke of exploring her views with a new clarity.

“I was learning about my own racism, which was ingrained in ways that you don’t always understand,” she said. “It really was a long journey for all of us. But, in a way, an exciting one, too.”

On Thursday night she plans to watch the candidate she has supported from the beginning accept the nomination, an experience she likens to that march 45 years ago. “It’s incredibly exciting,” she said.

And yet, even for these veterans, fear can temper their joy. They have seen too many defeats — many supported Jesse Jackson’s two losing runs at the nomination in the 1980s — to assume a near majority of white voters would elect a black man.

Ms. Woods-Jones, president of Black Women Organized for Political Action, nearly vibrates with the joy of living in this moment. She describes her 35-year-old son sitting on a couch with her grandson, crying as he watched Mr. Obama this week. This is a hopeful woman tempered by history.

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“The concern for me, well, America has grown to a point,” she said. “Having said that, there will still be those who go into the booth, their closet, and can’t vote for him. I hope, I pray, most of us are past that.”

A little earlier, Archie Spigner, a retired New York city councilman from Queens, sat on a park bench in Denver in his pin-striped suit. Gray now, he was a Young Turk in 1963 when he and other activists forced their white-run union to send buses to Washington. He came back enraptured but noticed that the world had not changed.

Mr. Spigner recalls real estate agents who would not return calls, burger joints in Queens that would not hire his constituents. Months ago, he endorsed Hillary Rodham Clinton, because she is his state’s senator (he harbors a lifelong allegiance to the powerful Queens Democratic Party machine) and because she might have had an easier joust with history.

“Would it have been easier with Hillary? Maybe,” he said. “We’re rolling the dice. As a black man, I hope, I hope.”

Ralph Blumenthal contributed reporting from New York, Robbie Brown from Atlanta, and Rachel L. Swarns from Washington.

This story, 45 Years Later, Witnesses to Dr. King’s Dream See a New Hope, first appeared in The New York Times.

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