“I was enthralled by Dr. King’s speech. Everyone was spellbound,” she said.
Intriguingly, the part of the speech that is most well-known was not in the script that King held that day. Clarke was a first person witness as to how King came to utter those memorable words.
“When Dr. King appeared to be nearing the end of the speech, I heard Mahalia Jackson say, ‘Tell ‘em about the dream, Martin.’ And then Dr. King told us about that dream,” Clarke said.
In fact, King had employed variations of “I Have a Dream” before, including at Oakwood University about a year and a half earlier. But the dream King conveyed that day before the gigantic statute of Abraham Lincoln to the hundreds of thousands on the National Mall, and the still many millions more watching on television, was to be immortalized in history. The footage of the speech shows Yolanda Clarke wiping tears from her eyes at King’s powerful words.
“I teared up because it was so beautiful,” she said. “To look out over the cause of freedom. This was a culmination of the marches in Selma and other cities, the jailings, the bombings, the hoses, the dogs, the sit-ins. … It was breathtaking.”
Click here to read more: Adventist Review Online | Who's That Adventist Woman Beside Martin Luther King Jr.?
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