Teacher Ernie Brill describes unforgettable 'I Have a Dream' day in DC
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NORTHAMPTON — City resident Ernie Brill wasn’t sure he wanted to go to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom that steamy summer of 1963.
Then a student at Antioch College in southern Ohio, Brill had long been interested in civil rights and was active in the campus chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) - one of the sponsors of the event. Still, he wasn't looking forward to getting up at 5 a.m. to ride a bus to a demonstration that no one knew would make history as the largest held in the nation's capital.
In the end, the veteran Northampton High School English teacher boarded the bus to Washington that Aug. 28.
"I had a feeling that this could be really big," Brill said, during an interview last week in his book-filled classroom. "I wanted to go and be a witness."
He has never forgotten what he saw and heard that day, along with a quarter of a million other marchers from across the country.
"You could feel it in the air. It was beyond electricity," said Brill, 66. "I looked around and there were black people, Chinese people, Latino people, a lot of white union people. People everywhere were singing. There was a group from a church in Georgia near us singing in four-part harmony."
Most memorable of all was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivering his "I Have a Dream" speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
"The fluency of King," said Brill, shaking his head in amazement. "The words and the imagery. And the poetry of it. It was everyday poetry that ordinary people could understand."
Coming to collect
Among the lines that stayed with him nearly five decades later is one in which King spoke of marchers coming to collect on a promise made by American democracy.
"In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check," King said. "This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Another standout line for Brill was King's reference to George Wallace, governor of Alabama - where attack dogs and fire hoses had been used to quell civil rights protests that year - as a man whose lips were "dripping with the words of interposition and nullification."
King went on to say that in his dream, "one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and girls as sisters and brothers."
When Brill and his classmates arrived in Washington at around 10 a.m. that day, "it was 98 degrees and the same for humidity," he recalled. "We didn't have water bottles then. People had those paper fans they were waving around."
When their bus pulled in, there were perhaps 20 others parked near the march site on the National Mall. "When we left, I counted and there were 308 buses" just in that one area, Brill said.
At an event marked by communion and celebration, some differences were still apparent. "The first thing I noticed was all of the African-American people who'd come to march were dressed in their Sunday best," Brill said. "And there I was in my jeans and work boots."
Among the many people he and his fellow students encountered was a group of Native Americans from South Dakota. "There was a bus full of Sioux tribal people in full dress holding signs that said, 'Give Us Back Our Land,'" Brill recalled. "I was really struck by that."
From their perch at the edge of the pool near the Lincoln Memorial, the students heard Mahalia Jackson sing and future U.S. Rep. John Lewis, then a leader in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, address the sprawling crowd.
On the ride back to Ohio, Brill remembers being "so excited, I could hardly sit down."
He stayed active in the civil rights movement and other social justice organizing during the 1960s and '70s. Brill left Antioch in his sophomore year and enrolled at San Francisco State University, where he took part in a student strike that led to the creation of the nation's first black studies department.
After earning both his bachelor's and master's degrees in English from San Francisco State, Brill worked for years as a hospital orderly while publishing poetry and fiction. In New York City, he was a member of the National Health Care Workers Union 1199 - which King had said was his "favorite union" - and also taught at a public middle school in Manhattan's Chinatown.
Classroom connection
The March on Washington is still alive in Brill's own writing - and in his classroom at Northampton High School, where he has been teaching since 1993.
Last week, in his world literature class, Brill asked students to analyze a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks written the day after King was assassinated in Memphis in 1968. He spent part of this past weekend grading a "free write" assignment his students did about King.
Brill believes too much of current teaching about the civil rights movement in public schools is uninspired. "I have kids who come in and say, 'I'm tired of hearing about MLK and I know all about Rosa Parks,'" he said. "So I ask them, 'Did you know Rosa Parks was secretary of the NAACP? That she was more than just a tired old lady on a bus?' You have to tell the whole story."
Poetry and fiction are a vital part of that story, Brill said, because they reflect "the emotional truth of any given people." As just one example, he recommends "Dr. King's Refrigerator and Other Bedtime Stories" by National Book Award winner Charles Johnson.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Brill plans to mark today's holiday by meditating and reading. He is exploring works by contemporary Chinese and Middle Eastern writers.
Brill, a Brooklyn native who attended his first civil rights vigil in ninth grade at the Statute of Liberty, hopes to take part in the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington next year.
"I can still hear the voices and see the people at the march," he said. "It feels like yesterday."
