Several years ago, at a private dinner during the March on Washington Film Festival, I heard Dr. Clarence Jones, personal attorney, and advisor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. tell this story.
Jones, Harry Belafonte, and Stanley Levison were among King’s closest advisors, helping to plan strategy, write speeches, organize events and raise funds. They were his “kitchen cabinet.”
One day, Belafonte called Jones to say that a major banker was donating tens of thousands of dollars to the Movement and he needed Jones to fly up to NY, pick up the cash, and take it back South to the Movement’s offices.
It was a Saturday. Jones arrived in Manhattan and went to the bank’s headquarters. Back then banks were closed on the weekends, but a small group of bankers were waiting for him.
They went into the empty, darkened building and down to the vault, where they opened the large, heavy vault door. Inside, Jones said, he saw stacks and stacks of wrapped bills. A couple of bundles were taken out and handed to him, which he put into a small suitcase. As he was leaving, the banker told him he had to sign for the money. It was a promissory note, stating that the funds would be paid back in a couple of months. Reluctantly, he signed and left.
Once outside, he ran to a pay phone and called Belafonte, in distress that he was now responsible for repaying the small fortune. As Jones tells it, Belafonte replied, “Better you than me, brother!”
Back in the office, a few days later, an envelope arrived in the mail. Much to Jones’ tremendous relief, it was the promissory note he’d signed, now stamped “Paid in Full.” The funds were a contribution, after all.
The coda to the story is that Jones used the incident as a metaphor in the speech ideas he later submitted to King. We know it well. In his I Have a Dream speech, delivered at the March on Washington a few months later, King declared,
“In a sense, we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check… a promissory note… that all men… would be guaranteed the ‘unalienable Rights’ of ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’ Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.”
Jones said it was the first time King used one of his prompts just as he’d written it.
This month, the last of the calendar year, is when non-profit organizations and charities appeal to their supporters for donations. What began in America in 2012 as Giving Tuesday has blossomed into a global movement.
The March on Washington Film Festival is just one of the organizations that benefit from the generosity of those who align with its mission. Each of us has many worthwhile and necessary causes we champion.
We may not have our own bank or stacks of cash to contribute, but in this season of giving, let us give more than words. Now is the time to help fund the work of those who are actively, often against tremendous odds, building a better world for us all.
