01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, August 17, 2003

I went to interview the Rev. Naomi Craig, 86, about the Aug. 28, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. She poured me a glass of lemonade and a pitcher of memories.

I thought she might like to watch a video I had seen of the people streaming in and of Martin Luther King's speech.

But she said she didn't need a video. She lived it. Indeed, she shows me her faded blue "I WAS THERE" pennant, and a souvenir button with black and white clasped hands.

Over the years at the State House and elsewhere on the political circuit, I have often run into Mrs. Craig, a Baptist who is the retired pastor of Fox Point's Sheldon Street Church.

Whether giving an invocation or engaging in conversation, she is pleasant, outspoken, and authoritative. I would not presume to say that talking with her is like talking with God, but it wouldn't surprise me.

In 1963, she was a 46-year-old senior clerk in the state tax division and active in the Urban League. She heard there'd be a march and knew immediately she wanted to go. Why? "Because I am a black woman."

Early on, coming out of high school, she had learned first hand about job discrimination, when it was routine for blacks to lose out on openings when they showed up and were seen to be "colored."

When she went to the march 40 years ago, joining Rhode Islanders on several buses that rode through the night, her wish was that the event would open America's eyes:

"I thought people would wake up and see: 'These people are not just sitting back hoping for things, they want something.' I wanted people to know how hard I tried to get a job. I wanted people to know that I wanted to be a part of this country, to put myself into it, to do something that makes this a better place for everybody else, and if I did get that job, whether a white girl or black girl came to me, I would work with her and help her to be a part of it. That's what life is all about -- helping somebody else to be a part of it. But nobody was helping us to be a part of anything."

Her husband, Horace, who was then a Providence police detective, tried to talk her out of joining the march. From sit-ins to freedom rides, civil rights demonstrations often had touched off violent emotions. Mrs. Craig says her husband warned that all it would take in Washington was "one little incident" to bring on "chaos."

Ask Horace if he wanted his wife to go and he'll tell you, "Oh my gosh, no!"

But she went, taking her 13-year-old daughter, Carol, to share in the historic moment.

Mrs. Craig may have sloughed off her husband's warnings, but she says that even among the people on the buses, there was fear. The word was: No one is to say anything that could spark a confrontation; if a bystander calls you a name, you are not to answer.

In Washington, where the day would turn out to be peaceful, Mrs. Craig was astonished and moved to see how many white people were among the more than 200,000 participants. Indeed, it had been striking for me to be reminded of it by the video. This was a high point of black-white cooperation.

It also was striking to see -- by today's standards -- how well people were dressed, men in ties and so forth. Mrs. Craig, who wore a suit and hat, says, "We always dress like that. You find if you go to a black church, we're dressed."

In the day's heat, she shed the jacket.

In a letter to the editor in The Providence Journal after the march, Mrs. Craig described the atmosphere moments before it began as "a sense of anticipation, as though the whole world had suddenly seemed to be holding its breath and waiting."

Now, in her John Street home, she is telling me of the marching and the songs like "We Shall Overcome":

"The most moving piece was 'Mine eyes have seen the glory.' (She breaks into song.) 'Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.' Everybody was singing, 'Glory, glory' -- and your feet -- 'hallelujah' -- the feet, the sound of the feet . . . it was like the inside of you coming out."

She and her group wound up so far back, off to the side of the reflecting pool stretching in front of the Lincoln Memorial, that she could not see the speakers. And sometimes it was hard to hear.

But there was no problem, she says, hearing the booming voice of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., 34. He began slowly but then turned up the tempo and ignited the crowd. Mrs. Craig wasn't surprised: People who had heard King before had told her, "There's a young man that really can speak."'

She tells me, "Black people have the best ministers. We have ministers that can speak. I don't think there's anybody who can speak like a black minister. And they have the cadence. 'I HAVE A DREAM: One day little black children will hold hands with little white children.' And (again),'I HAVE A DREAM,' and he knows just when to come in with it."

She listened to King and she thought, "This is what God wants us to have" -- someone who could lift the black spirit and drive home the message that "we are somebody."

King and the crowd played off of each other; there was rolling applause as his voice soared.

Mrs. Craig talks of a sensation that black people experience:

"There is something in us when a black minister is speaking to us. He's pouring out his soul . . . (He's) saying it but we're feeling it."

As she listened to King, she says, "I knew with people like him in the front, nobody could stop us."

BUT, OF COURSE, by 1968 King would be dead. Whenever I see the Washington speech or read it over, I am always jolted by its ending:

"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!' "

I am jolted because the free-at-last theme is on King's tombstone in Atlanta. Mrs. Craig says, "That should be on every one of our tombstones."

Jesse Jackson once told me slaves believed that, in death, "you'd be beyond the slavemaster's whip, you'd be beyond his oppression."

When I mention this to Mrs. Craig, she summons a broader interpretation of the free-at-last expression:

"It was free from everything that was holding us back."

The March on Washington hardly solved the nation's civil rights problems, but it created, at least for a time, some momentum. Mrs. Craig says it spread the idea that black people had a dream and wanted it to come true in their lifetimes. "We didn't want a dream deferred. Everything we got, we had to wait for . . . Why should we have to wait?"

IN 1993, SHE returned to Washington for a 30th anniversary march. Afterward, she wrote in an essay, "I do not have to march on Washington again. My march on Washington will be my telling the story of the American dream to our young African-Americans." In fact, she declared, "We are the dream. We are Americans."

At 4 p.m. Aug. 28, she plans to attend a 40th anniversary program in Providence sponsored by the Rhode Island Historical Society, the Rhode Island Black Heritage Society, and the Providence Human Relations Commission. The event, at the John Brown House at 52 Power St., also will mark the debut of a brochure on Rhode Island and the slave trade.

There will undoubtedly be several mentions that day of Martin Luther King.

I ask Mrs. Craig what she would tell a young person about King's gift for inspiration. Suppose someone said, "I wasn't there to hear King. Did I really miss something?"

Mrs. Craig says she'd reply, "You missed the best part of your life if you didn't hear him. He was just great."

Tuesday's column: Governor Carcieri and Rhode Island race relations in 2003.

M. Charles Bakst, The Journal's political columnist, can be reached by e-mail at mbakst@projo.com