Mahalia Jackson has been most remembered for her singing - and therefore relatively few take notice of the pivotal role that she played within Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech.
This “Queen of Gospel” was born on October 26, 1911 in what is now called the Black Pearl section of Uptown New Orleans. Wikipedia reports that her three-room home there “housed thirteen people” – one of whom was family “patriarch” Rev. Paul Clark (a former slave). Mahalia’s father was a dockworker and barber who later became a Baptist minister. Mahalia “began her singing career at the local Mount Mariah Baptist Church.”
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| Mahalia Jackson (by Van Vechten) |
Jackson became part of the Great Migration when she moved north to Chicago in 1927. There her Gospel momentum rapidly increased. After meeting composer Thomas A. Dorsey (“Father of Gospel Music”), Jackson began a long-term musical association with him. Her signature song, Take My Hand, Precious Lord, was one that he had composed. Although she was frequently offered money to do so, “Mahalia refused to sing secular music, a pledge she would keep throughout her professional life.”
According to her 1972 New York Times obituary, Jackson was closely associated with the black civil rights movement during the last decade of her life. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had requested that she sing I Been ‘Buked, and I Been Scorned as a prelude to his 1963 March on Washington speech. Word has it that this did not start out to be King’s greatest speech; in fact, he was just about winding it up without even including the “I have a dream” passages.
Suddenly, Jackson’s voice once again rang out in the crowd. The Guardian reports that “she urged him:
‘Tell them about your dream Martin. Tell them about the dream.’” King was thus directly inspired by Jackson “to draw upon a version of a speech he had made many times before… which centered upon his dream of a society in which race was no longer a boundary to individual opportunity and collective strength.” The rest, as they say, is history.
Resources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahalia_Jackson
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/aug/21/usa.comment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Pearl,_New_Orleans
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/1026.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_A._Dorsey
Copyright February 7, 2012 by Linda Van Slyke All Rights Reserved
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