On this fine day for a beer, the Democratic National Convention comes to a close. Earlier this afternoon, Colorado’s own Yonder Mountain String Band took the stage at Denver’s INVESCO Field to warm up the crowd.* Later this evening, Barack Obama addresses the convention – and the nation – for the first time formally and officially as the country’s first black Presidential nominee.
All week long, convention-goers have had the opportunity to sample the Wynkoop Brewing Company’s homage to both German tradition and the self-proclaimed candidate of “Change We Can Believe In”: The Obamanator.
It is our job here neither to endorse nor oppose Barack Obama’s historic run. A fine beer is something that can and should be enjoyed across party lines. Divisions of politics, divisions of race and class and culture, can all be temporarily cast aside with a communal toast. Whether an Obama supporter or skeptic, as you reach into the refrigerator (there’s a good name for a doppelbock: Refrigerator) and retrieve that perfect brew, it’s an opportunity for reflection.
As tonight’s speakers will certainly not be shy about reminding us, it was 45 years ago today that Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous “I Have A Dream Speech.” This evening, in some small but historic way, that dream is realized. Some may be indifferent, some may choose to pat themselves on the back, others may feel that King’s dream remains a distant hope. Pint in hand, a better course would be to simply pause and consider where we were so many years ago.
Eight years to the day before Dr. King spoke his most famous words, 14 year old Emmett Till was murdered in Money, Mississippi – for the mere crime of speaking, though perhaps not with the utmost respect, to a white woman. It was a lynching twice commemorated in verse by that luminary of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes. Bob Dylan – himself among the performers to kick off the proceedings in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 – mourned Till’s murder in song.
The 1963 March on Washington came two and a half months after Medgar Evers was murdered, two and a half weeks before the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama claimed the lives of four black girls, and three months before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The 24th Amendment, ending the poll tax, had not yet been ratified. What would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964, first introduced by President Kennedy in a televised address just hours before Evers was shot, would not become law for nearly a year.
It was, needless to say, a different time, and a turbulent time when King ascended to the podium 45 years ago. “King delivered his address in his clearest diction and stateliest baritone,” writes Taylor Branch in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Parting The Waters (the first of a masterful three-volume biography of King).
Ovations interrupted him in the cracks of infrequent oratorical flourish, and in difficult passages small voices cried “Yes!” and “Right on!” as though grateful and proud to hear such talk. From the front, a woman could be heard to laugh and shout “Sho ‘nuff!” when King told them about the freedom checks that had bounced. Five minutes later, when King declared that the movement would not stop “as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and hotels of the cities,” a shout went up from a pocket of the crowd so distant that the sound did not reach King for a second or two.
He recited his text verbatim until a short run near the end: “We will not be satisfied until justice runs down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” The crowd responded to the pulsating emotion transmitted from the prophet Amos, and King could not bring himself to deliver the next line of his prepared text...Instead, extemporaneously, he urged them to return to their struggles (“Go back to Mississippi. Go back to Alabama...”), to believe that change would come “somehow” and that they could not “wallow in the valley of despair.”
There was no alternative but to preach...Later, King said only that he forgot the rest of the speech and took up the first run of oratory that “came to me.”
It’s tempting to reproduce the entire passage here – a powerful depiction of a moment both inspired and inspiring. It’s tempting, too, to suggest a particular beer – one that’s bold and strong, peerless and inspired – to parallel Dr. King and his defining speech. It would be but a trite analogy, though. The beer at hand is beer enough, as we ponder our past and plot our future. It is surely a fine day for a beer.
*If you’re still in need of warming up, Yonder Mountain String Band's songs “River” and “Wind’s On Fire” are available as downloads on the band’s web site.
