We Are Falling Short | How George Raveling Was Given the “I Have a Dream” Speech

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0:56Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day here in America. And it's worth taking a minute today to consider one particularly brilliant and inspiring part from King's approach to civil rights. What Martin Luther King didn't do in the 1950s and 1960s was simply point out how hypocritical and flawed the United States was. He didn't use his immense skills as an order to paint a depressing, bleak picture of the racial state of affairs. On the contrary, what MLK did was work hard to capture the true essence of what America was supposed to be. He picked up all the central beliefs of the founding fathers, justice, freedom, equality.

1:39And then he said, we can live up to this. We can do this together. We are capable of better. Of course, America did not hear this message immediately. In fact, huge swaths of the population did not want to hear it at all. So King and his followers showed them. They took to the streets and through the new medium of television made it undeniable just how far short America had fallen from its ideals, how disgusting and disturbing segregation and racism were. Faced with this appalling spectacle, the country worked little by little to reach for that higher standard he set for us, to fulfill the vision of what the country was intended to be.

2:21It should be said that the Stoics follow a similar tact. Unlike some philosophies and religions which use their logic and intellect to make life seem meaningless and small, the Stoics sought to inspire the individual to reach their full human potential. Sure, they would point out the discrepancies and failures, but only to make a larger point, to be able to say, look at you, you are better than this, you can do more, you need to do more. And in Marcus Aurelius' writings, we find a man who in his private moments sought to say to himself, You studied this philosophy your whole life. Now you're in a position of power.

2:59Live up to it. Make good on your promises. Be what your fathers hoped you could be. And of course, this is not easy to do. We will fall short along the way. We will fall embarrassingly and shamefully short. In the case of civil rights, it took hundreds of years for the full version of the equality laid out in the Declaration of Independence in the U.S. Constitution to be made true. and we're still falling short today, just as we on an individual level will fall short of our potential and our ideals. Why is that? It's because we are human, because the standards are lofty and challenging, because what Martin Luther King Jr.

3:39said was true, that there is something of a civil war going on within all our lives. There is a recalcitrant south of our soul revolting against the north of our soul and there is this continual struggle within the very structure of every individual life. But we have to keep trying. We can honor his memory and our potential today by making headway in that battle and then get up and do the very same again tomorrow.

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7:37When you say trip down memory lane as it relates to the King speech. How does one come in possession of one of the most significant pieces of American history? How does that happen? One of my best friends at this time in my life was named Warren Wilson. and his dad was a very prominent dentist in Wilmington and probably the most prominent black person in the state of Delaware. This was a Thursday night, and I was having dinner at their house, and the conversation turned to the March on Washington, and Dr. Wilson said, are you guys going down to the March on Washington? And we said, no. And he said, why not?

8:26And so Warren said, well, we don't have any money or way to get there. And so he said, OK, you take one of the cars and I'll give you enough money to get you through the weekend. But I think you guys should be down there. And he had a premonition that this was going to be a special moment in the lives of black folks. And so we drove down. Warren and I drove down. We found a place to stay. We decided let's go down to the monument grounds and just see what it looks like and how the best way to get there. And so we get down there in the evening and we run into a gentleman and he says, are you guys coming tomorrow?

9:06And we said, yeah. And he said, would you guys be interested in being a security? And we said, sure, we'll be interested. And so he told us to meet him down there the next morning at 8. And we found him. And he looked at us, two, six, four dudes, and he said, OK, you guys are going to be part of the security force for the podium. And they had a special contingent of security for each of the speakers. It actually started around nine o 'clock in the morning. The first speaker was John Lewis. And what was fascinating was this was the largest gathering of black people in the history of America. And so each of the speakers worked their way through the day.

9:52And Martin Luther King was the last speaker on the dais. And so part of the security was that if something were to break loose and we were to usher all the people on the podium and area out the back and park behind the Lincoln Memorial was a bus. And we would get all of the celebrities into the bus in a protective position if something happened. And so when Dr. King got up to speak, we, the security people, knew that when he got to the very last, we were to put a sort of a U-shape around the people on the podium and get them off the podium safely. And so when King started the speech, first of all, there's a variety of things that people don't understand about the speech.

10:48Each speaker had to submit their speech in advance for approval. And they wouldn't approve James Baldwin unless they made some changes and Baldwin wouldn't speak. He said, if you want me to speak, I got to say what I want to say. And so Baldwin never got to speak. So King's speech had no title. It was five minutes. He submitted it and he began to speak. As he got toward the end of the speech, you hear this voice say, tell him about the dream, Martin. Tell him about the dream. And that was Mahalia Jackson, a great Negro gospel singer, who was her and Harry Belafonte basically bankroll most of Martin's movement.

11:32They were the ones who financed it. So now we get down and King is getting toward the conclusion of the speech. And right, if you put the written type speech up against what he was saying on the podium, it will all be word for word until he gets to the last paragraph. And just as he gets there, Mahalia Jackson says, tell him about the dream, Martin. Tell him about the dream. And so now she had heard Martin talk at other occasions and reference this piece about having a dream. And so Martin Luther King ad-libbed the I Have a Dream part into the speech. It was never intended at all. And so he took off and finished it off with the I Have a Dream speech.

12:20And so when Dr. King was finished the speech, he started to fold it. And I was right on his left side. And as he started to fold it, I don't know, for whatever reason, I said, Dr. King, can I have that speech? And it was folded, and he handed it to me. And actually, in a documentary that CBS did, they actually showed him folding it, and you can see where he's handing it to me. And so it was the best request I ever made in my life. I never even had an idea that the speech would take on the historic significance that it did. I had the speech for over 50 years, and no one even knew that I had the original copy and so forth.

13:05And then when I took the job at the University of Iowa, the Des Moines Register was going to do a Sunday feature in the magazine on me being the first black coach at Iowa and in the Big Ten. And so a reporter who came down to do the story during the interview, he said to me, were you ever involved in the civil rights movement? And I told him about about the March on Washington and so forth. And he said, what? You have the speech? I said, yeah. And I had just moved to Iowa. A lot of the boxes hadn't been opened yet. So we went down and found the speech and I showed it to him. Tell him what you were storing it in, because that's another little quirk of the history of this story that's almost unbelievable.

13:52Yeah, I had the speech stored inside of a book that President Truman gave me. And when I was a senior, I got invited to play in the East West All-Star Game in Kansas City. And one of the things they did was they took us out to meet President Truman. And then we walked in. His office looked like the Oval Office at the White House. And so he talked to us about his life as a president. And then at the end, he had just finished this two-volume set of his history as the president. And so when we're walking out, they give each of us two copies that he had written. And so if I had the Truman book right here in front of me, it says, To George H.

14:41Ravling from Harry S. Truman, and it has the date there. Well, I kept the King's speech inside of that because, one, I knew that I would never throw those books away or give them away because how many people can say they have a personally autographed book from a president of the United States? And so I put the speech that was folded inside the book and I just left it there for years. I used the Truman books as a frame of reference as to where it was. And so, like I said, for over 50 years, no one knew I had it. But once the Des Moines Register came out with the story and told the public that I had the original speech, then all hell broke loose because now one was the fact that I had it, that it was in good shape and so forth.

15:37And so, you know, my wife got a little concerned about it, having it in the house. And she says, now that the public knows where it is, they might come some night and try to break into the house to get the speech. And we actually ended up putting it in a vault here in Los Angeles for a number of years just for safe keeping. Did Charles Barkley offer you millions of dollars for it? Yes, but I couldn't really tell if Charles was just big time in me or what. But when he found out about it, he says, Coach Rav, I'll give you a million dollars for that speech. And, you know, honestly, I never took Charles seriously on it.

16:16But knowing Charles, he probably would have put the million up. He wanted to make sure it was tucked away safely somewhere. And then ultimately you donated it, right? People would say, well, what are you going to do with it? I said, I'm going to give it to my son. As the years passed, one of the things that I thought would be a good idea is if I could get it to become the property of Villanova, where I went to school and graduated. So Golnar worked out a deal with the African-American Museum that for the next 10 years, they would have possession of the speech and they would put it on display six months out of the year.

16:58And so the actual copy is at the African-American Museum in Washington, D.C. Ultimately, when the time comes to transfer the speech back to Villanova, we've probably got about six or eight more years at the museum. And then ultimately, the speech will go back to Villanova and it'll be in their archives for forever.

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18:03Thank you.