AUGUST 28 – 1963 MLK delivers Dream Speech; 1798 Founding Father Wilson dies penniless during Panic of 1796; 1837 Worcester ssauce invented, John Lea and William Perrins; 1955 NFL first preseason OT sudden death
1963 MLK delivers I Have a Dream.
In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln executively ordered the Emancipation Proclamation which freed three and a half million slaves, but as Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out in his world-famous speech that took place right underneath Lincoln’s feet at his Washington DC Memorial, “100 years later, the Negro is still not free.”
In 1961, Freedom Riders began hopped on interstate buses heading south to challenge several court cases giving black people the right to ride up front in the buses. Some were beaten, but the movement was legislatively effective. Now across the nation, the Birmingham Campaign of 1963 by King’s very own Southern Christian Leadership Conference, folks were watching on television demonstrators being attacked by dogs and large water hoses.
King would be imprisoned in this demonstration, and wrote “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” The peacefully mighty MLK got together with Negro American Labor Council founder Philip Randolph, and the idea for a march was in the works. But this was no ordinary march my friends, King and Randolph assembled what they called the Big Six: Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, Whitney Young of the National Urban League, James Farmer of CORE; the Congress on Racial Equality, John Lewis, of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
You don’t have to be a history buff to realize with these people, King took Mahatma Gandhi’s advice. King had prepared his speech the night before, estimating around 150,000 folks would be there. Try 250,000 people Popular white rock musicians Bob Dylan and Joan Baez played, along with all the speakers, and then came Martin Luther King Jr.
The man of the house, the tower of power, too sweet to be sour, he spoke as eloquently as any natural born leader in history. Free at last! King referred to the Bible and the U.S. Constitution, using the proper tone and cadence that sets him above the greatest orators in history, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was the 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.”
As Lincoln’s statue sat above him, Lincoln himself couldn’t have been prouder. When will justice be satisfied? King made that very clear to go back to Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, Georgia, and the slums of the northern cities, and said “we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until “justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
Free at last!
At the end, he didn’t need that speech that he had written in the wee hours of the night before, because he knew exactly what he wanted to say: I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. And when this happens, and when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: “Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”
It’s considered one the greatest speeches ever. It led to the Civil Rights Act on 1964.
Amazing Grace indeed.
1798 – Founding Father James Wilson dies of a stroke Je was chased by bill collectors at a friend’s house during the Panic of 1796-1797.
Born in Scotland in 1742, James Wilson immigrated to the colonies in 1766 and became a prominent lawyer and land speculator. By 1774 Wilson was well established in the colony of Pennsylvania as a successful orator and wrote a booklet called “Considerations on the nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament”, where he argued that the British had no rights to tax the American colonies without representation. A year later Wilson was elected to the Continental Congress and would eventually sign the Declaration of Independence representing Pennsylvania. For the rest of the 1780s, he became president of the Illinois-Wabash Company, a land speculation company, and served as a delegate of Democrat-Republican party in Philadelphia. 
In 1789 he became one of the first associate justices at the Supreme Court. He was heavily active in drafting the Pennsylvania Constitution in 1790.
But being an aggressive gambler already heavily in debt, things turned south for Judge Wilson. In 1796, the land speculation bubble burst in the new United States, while England, who was fighting with France, was dealing with deflation which triggered a financial collapse. The Bank Restriction Act of 1797 in England squeezed the control of gold and silver. Commercial firms all over the US began closing down, and the bill was due in full. Robert Morris, who was one of the major financiers of the American Revolution, wound up in prison after being unable to pay for a bad land deal in western New York State. Judge James Wilson, who was never forgiven by his creditors, also served time in prison.
The Panic would lead to the much more forgiving Bankruptcy Act of 1800, which wound up being too forgiving and was repealed in 1803. But by then, it was too late for Judge Wilson, signer of the Declaration of Independence, who died on the run from his bill collectors, at a friend’s house in North Carolina on this day, 1798.
1968 – Protests at the DNC in Chicago.
…The assassinations of Martin Luther king, as well as Robert Kennedy, plus the seemingly inability for the democrat party to end the war in Vietnam caused mass tension and finally boiled over during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in late August, 1968. Tens of thousands of protestor gathered in the streets and American support to end the spread communism was effectively split. 2 million Vietnamese troops and 58,000 American troops died in the effort to keep communism from spreading into South Vietnam and beyond.
When police refused to allow them near the hotel where the Convention was taking place, violence hit the proverbial roof. Mayor Richard Daley called in the National Guard. 7500 Army regulars, 7500 Illinois Guardsmen, and 1000 FBI agents were sent to restore order. Inside the hotel, meanwhile, more chaos was going on. Fights were braking out on the convention floor and delegates and reporters were beaten. The events were shown on TV across the land and support for the Vietnam War fell to an all-time low.
2007—We lost a great American. Arthur Jones, inventor of the Nautilus machine,
…dies August 28 2007. His ideas of variable resistance for the body using short, single sets were a radical change from the Arnold Schwarzenegger School of training which was all about high intensity training using free weights. These days Nautilus is also coupled with the Stairmaster and Bowflex exercising equipment.
2006 – Fugitive polygamist leader Warren Jeffs is arrested.
…Born December 3, 1955, former president of the Fundamentalist Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-Day Saints Church was convicted of two felony counts of child sexual assault in 2011. He was facing charges in Arizona and Utah was on the run from the FBI for over a year when a police officer caught up to him at a traffic stop.
And then in 2008, Jeff’s Yearning for Zion Ranch in Eldorado Texas was raided and police found over 400 children who would remain in temporary state custody. Jeffs was extradited to Texas from Utah, where he was convicted of child sexual assault in a case involving a 12-year old girl and a 15-year old girl, with whom she had Jeff’s baby. Jeffs is serving life in prison. Epic fail, dude.
1837 – From Worcester Country Maryland, pharmacists John Lea and William Perrins manufacture Worcestershire sauce.
1955 – Dare I talk about a preseason football event deemed to be worthy of a note on a US History show? Probably not but I’ll do it anyway. The Rams beat the Giants 23-17 in the NFL’s very first preseason sudden death.
1967 – In San Francisco, the Grateful Dead, along with Janis Joplin’s band Big Brother and Holding Co, play at a funeral for a Hells’ Angel who died after getting hit by a car. That must’ve been some funeral.