Why the Voice should have a dream as big as Martin Luther King’s

Sixty years ago, on a glorious moment in August 1963, a 34-year-old black preacher stepped before a thicket of microphones on the steps of the Lincoln Monument to deliver what is perhaps the greatest oration in US history.

Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, it is often forgotten, might have never become a reality. Fearing the possibility of a race riot on the doorstep of the White House, and also the besiegement of Congress, President John F. Kennedy lobbied for the cancellation of the March on Washington. Furthermore, little in its early passages suggested that King was delivering a speech for the ages, since for once, he struggled to find his rhythm.

Noel Pearson, like Martin Luther King, has a rare speechifying power.Credit:

Only when the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, who was standing at his shoulder, urged him to “tell ’em about the dream, Martin” – poetry she had heard him recite before – did the speech take oratorial flight.

The rest is epic history. As he shared his vision of a country in which blacks would be judged on the content of their character, not the colour of their skin, King subpoenaed the conscience of white America. By doing so, he helped build public support for landmark legislation passed the following year, the Civil Rights Act, which demolished segregation in the South, and brought his dream of racial equality a quantum leap closer. King seized the historical moment. America became much the better for it.

Though the history is different, and the situation not directly analogous, there’s a part of me that wishes that the Yes campaign would stage a similar set-piece speech, ideally with Uluru as the backdrop. But I realise, of course, that Australians are wary of such stage management and grandiloquence. That said, the text of an Australian iteration of the “I have a dream” speech, shorn of King’s Biblical grace notes, but vested with much the same moral power, already exists in various forms. In less showy settings, in a less showy way, one of the leaders of the Yes campaign, Noel Pearson, has been delivering it for months, and rehearsing it for decades.

Just as King spoke of how America could not fulfil its destiny while the African-American “still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land,” Pearson argues that Australia will never be complete unless First Nations peoples are given a proper voice. “Indigenous people can’t languish in an Australia that has the default setting of No,” he said at the Garma festival earlier this month. The country’s “ancient beginnings” should not just be a “story on the margins”.

Just as King tried to weave together various strands to produce a more inclusive American grand narrative without a wholesale rejection of the past, Pearson repeated at Garma what he has been saying for years, that by adopting the Uluru Statement From The Heart Australia, has “the chance to put our complete story together.” It is a trilogy of “Indigenous foundations,” “British institutions captured in the Constitution,” and “a glorious multicultural unity.” His essential promise is that: “These three stories can be brought together in this vote”.

A key message from King’s speech 60 years ago was that it would be “fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment”. Indeed, he spoke at a time when black America was in a state of near open rebellion, hence the fretfulness of the Kennedy White House.

Obviously, the Australia of 2023 is very different from the America of 1963, but the historic opportunity to remedy a racial wrong is equivalent. “This is our last best chance,” claims Pearson, of a referendum which he described at Garma as “the most important event in the two centuries of colonial occupation of this country.” So while the campaign may lack the drama of epic history, the vote is unquestionably momentous and defining.

There was also a subtext to King’s speech that finds an echo in the here and now from Indigenous elders such as Pearson: if you don’t deal with moderates, then more militant voices will take our place. King was essentially telling white America, this is your one chance, don’t blow it.

At Garma, Pearson jokingly evoked Sir Winston Churchill. “We’re going to love them on the beaches,” he deadpanned, a line ready-made for TikTok and Twitter. But his speeches reflect much of the same thinking as Dr King.

This son of the Guugu Yimithirr community has his critics, many of them First Nations peoples, who have bemoaned the fawning coverage he often receives in the predominantly white press. Placing him on the same page as MLK will strike them, and others, as a stretch. Yet the Yes campaign sees him as its most persuasive messenger, a potentially transcendent figure blessed with rare speechifying power. His dream of an Australia with an Indigenous Voice to parliament could well become its closing argument ahead of the referendum: of how “our children will have a new sense of who they are as Australians. That will be the ultimate reconciliation”.

Nick Bryant, a former BBC Washington correspondent, is the author of The Bystander: John F. Kennedy and the Struggle for Black Equality.

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