Fifty years ago this week (Aug. 28) Martin Luther King, Jr. put a historic exclamation point on the Civil Rights movement’s “March on Washington” when he stood before the Lincoln Memorial and delivered to some 250,000 people, and millions watching on television, the most famous and important American speech since — well, since the Second Inaugural Address given by Lincoln himself.  But unbeknownst to most people, King hadn’t intended to give that speech. “I Have a Dream” was basically an ad lib.

King did have a prepared speech that day, which was supposed to run seven minutes, and for a while he stuck to it, talking about “cashing checks” at the “bank of justice” and how America should not have “insufficient funds,” etc.  Even helped by King’s preacher-trained voice, to many (including me) the metaphor seemed a stretch.

But finally King came to a passage (“And so today, let us go back to our communities as members of the international association for the advancement of creative dissatisfaction.”) that he just couldn’t bring himself to recite, and as it happened, the great African-American singer, Mahalia Jackson, who was standing behind King on the podium, whispered “Tell them about the dream, Martin.”  She was referring to a sermon she had heard King deliver weeks earlier in which he had explored a broad outline of his “dream” theme.

Whether Jackson’s whispered plea influenced King or not, he suddenly said “what came to me.”  What “came” to King began as follows:  “I say to you today, my friends, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American Dream.”

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This week, (June 19) the U.S. Senate passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and to appreciate the magnitude of this achievement you need to understand the obstacles in its path.

First, legislation must pass in both the House and Senate, which usually pass very different versions of the bill. A House-Senate committee must work out those differences before it can become a law, which is usually a drawn-out process.

But even before legislation can come to the House or Senate floor it first has to be considered by the relevant House and Senate committees, and in 1964 almost all committees related to civil rights were controlled by southerners who had no intention of passing such legislation.  And so they dawdled.  Congressman Howard Smith from Virginia, for example, was chairman of the House Rules Committee, and because no legislation can go to the House floor without that committee reporting it out, Smith made sure the civil rights legislation stayed in his committee.

Another southern strategy was to hold other bills — bills northern politicians wanted passed — hostage to civil rights legislation.  Any bill not passed in the two years each Congress is in session must start over in the next Congress, which means reintroduction, new rounds of debate and negotiation in both branches, and (hopefully) passage by both branches.  By stalling on legislation northerners supported — funding for home-heating subsidies in northern cities, for example — southerners could pressure northern politicians to withdraw the civil rights bill or see their pet legislation die in that Congress.

To that end, in 1964 an appropriations bill important to northerners was sent to the Senate Appropriations Committee, which referred it to a subcommittee chaired by John McClellan of Arkansas, who referred it to a subcommittee of his subcommittee, which suddenly became too busy to hold hearings on the bill.   Meaning more delay because a subcommittee must report out a bill before the full committee can vote on it.  Thus, the message was clear to northern liberals. Withdraw civil rights or we stall your priority legislation to death.

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This week (May 17) in 1954 America recovered some of her promise when the Supreme Court handed down its unanimous opinion in Brown vs. the Board of Education.  In its wake, the legally sanctioned principle of “separate but equal” treatment of whites and blacks became a thing of the past.

The ruling that had sanctioned “separate but equal” treatment was Plessy vs. Ferguson, which held that segregating the races was not discriminatory provided each race had access to “equal” facilities.  Legally, the ruling was specious.  Practically, it was a joke, especially in the South where white schools were equipped with modern teaching tools, while “equal” black schools were lucky to have blackboards and chalk.

In Topeka, Kansas, this disparity was not lost on Oliver Brown, whose daughter Linda was forced to pass by a spiffy whites-only school to attend a run-down black school farther away.  Nor was it lost on Thurgood Marshall, the black head lawyer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).  Marshall had been looking for a test case to overturn Plessy, in particular a case in a border state where racism was less ingrained than in the Deep South.  Smartly, Marshall attacked segregation at its edges and then used those victories as stepping-stones toward his ultimate goal of abolishing it nationwide.  Thus when Brown sued the Kansas school system, Marshall took his case, intending to bring it to the Supreme Court.

When it got there, recently appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren quickly saw Brown as a way to end this “separate but equal” segregation charade, but he felt that on an issue this divisive only a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court would have the legal and moral force to compel acquiescence, if not total acceptance.

That would be no small feat, because his fellow justices included several monumental egotists, one skeptical Southerner, a “go-it-alone” maverick and a die-hard segregationist. It took Warren’s considerable negotiating skills to do it, but he finally got everyone to agree that Linda Brown’s 14^th Amendment rights to equal treatment were being violated.

Warren read the court’s unanimous decision from the bench, with this ending: “We conclude that … the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.  Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

The decision stunned the nation, and although it was only the beginning of the journey toward a new integrated America, it definitely marked the end of the old era in which segregation based on race, creed or color was sanctioned by law.

In that sense, although it wasn’t a “trial” per se, one could argue that for African-Americans, Brown vs. the Board of Education was the “Trial of the Century.”