President Barack Obama’s voice boomed over the Lincoln Memorial’s marble steps and across the Reflecting Pool: “His words belong to the ages, possessing a power and prophecy unmatched in our time.” The grey skies intermittently drizzled over the crowd gathered below. “He gave mighty voice to the quiet hopes of millions.”
The president was speaking, of course, about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. On the semicentennial anniversary of Dr. King’s soaring address and the 1963 March on Washington, a ceremony billed as the Let Freedom Ring Commemoration was organized at the very site of his eminent “I Have a Dream” speech. On August 28, 2013, the president was joined by a coterie of dignitaries to pay tribute to the legacy of the late activist.
Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, First Lady Michelle Obama, members of the King family, civil rights leaders, Lynda Johnson Robb and Caroline Kennedy (daughters of two presidents who had their thumbprints on the Civil Rights Act), Oprah Winfrey, and guests who attended the March on Washington 50 years earlier joined President Obama on the hallowed spot.
Just after 3:00pm, the King family rang a large cast iron bell brought to the site from the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama (location of the 1963 bombing). Temporarily installed at the Lincoln Memorial to lead the nationwide tribute, it was one bell of many rung in nearly every state to celebrate the hour when Dr. King uttered his now-iconic words.
Image: President Barack Obama claps next to the cast iron bell from the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, during the Let Freedom Ring Commemoration marking the 50th anniversary of the “I Have a Dream” speech on August 28, 2013.
The bell’s sonorous tolls rippled across the gathered crowd and spoke of the movement that changed America. Alluding to Dr. King’s own message, President Obama continued: “The arc of the moral universe may bend toward justice, but it doesn’t bend on its own.” It takes all of us – questioning, caring, pushing, learning, listening, striving, and ringing.
The bell of freedom cannot be unrung.
Ten years after the Let Freedom Ring Commemoration, the National Bell Festival brought another historical bell to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to mark the exact 160th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation that President Abraham Lincoln signed on January 1, 1863. See how we paid tribute to that momentous stroke of the pen.
Cover image: President Barack Obama, former presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, and Oprah Winfrey watch as members of the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s family ring a bell during the Let Freedom Ring Commemoration marking the 50th anniversary of the “I Have a Dream” speech on August 28, 2013.
