While I was creating this, I listened to speeches given by King (and also an amazing interview with Heschel). I was struck by the heaviness of it all that I didn’t feel when I created a similar piece back in 2016. That everything King was fighting for and talking about it is still so relevant today.

We are still on that march. We are still demanding justice. We still need to work on ourselves so much and do more, change more, be more. We can’t celebrate yet.

What I was most struck with was listening to King’s March on Washington. It does not begin with the words “I have a dream”, even though it’s referred to as that.

It the first minute of his speech, after detailing how inequality is still ravaging the country for black people, King then states “In a sense we have come to our Nation’s Capital to cash a check.”

We have come to our Nation’s Capital to cash a check.
He goes on:

“When the architects of our great republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.

This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given its colored people a bad check, a check that has come back marked “insufficient funds.”

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and security of justice.”

And yet, when we talk about King we talk about the rosy, vague idea of his dream of black and white boys and girls playing together. But he began with the idea that he came to cash a check.

A check signifies in capitalist societies real acceptance of worth and belonging and power and the ability to heal.

Racial and economic justice. When we demand money, we have reached the point when we have been able to at the very least convince ourselves of our own worth.We honor those that we give our money to. King came to Washington to cash a check.