Reflecting on the meaning of August 28th

Already, it has been a huge year for American history. 250 years!

Across the country, people have celebrated us and US in all kinds of ways. Fireworks. Waving flags. Olympic gold medals. Singing “God Bless America” during the 7^th inning stretch.

We have had a UFC event at the White House, IndyCar vehicles roaring around the National Mall, attempts to refurbish the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

Thus far, about 2.5 million babies have been born in the United States this year, including my first grandchild.

We have lost a lot of people, too. Dolly Parton. Lindsay Graham. Jesse Jackson. Renee Good. Alex Pretti. Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero. Now we have arrived at the sacred day of August 28.

Maybe it doesn’t conjure the patriotic associations of July 4, but it is a day deeply connected to our nation’s history, deeply connected to our nation’s identity.

Dr. King delivers the goods on August 28, 1963. [Rowland Scherman, U.S. Information Agency/National Archives, public domain]

PART 1: August 28, 1963, Washington, DC

Can you find a more hopeful day in our 250-year journey? A day when We the People came closer to living the idealism of our founding words?

Think of the Reflecting Pool on that day. Think of what it truly reflected. Not just the majesty of the Lincoln Memorial on one end (“the better angels of our nature”) and the Washington Monument on the other (“the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty”). But also the image of Black and white legs dangling together in the water, a baptism for a multiracial democracy.

Bask in the idealism of the music. Mahalia Jackson and Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. And before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord and be free….If I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the morning…The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind…We shall overcome, some day.

Feel the heart fill and the crescendo build when Martin Luther King Jr. is introduced as “the moral leader of our nation.” And even if in some ways he wasn’t that—as we have come to learn—there were other ways in which he was all of that. The best of him was the best of us.

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.

The Slave Market in The Plaza de la Constitución in downtown St. Augustine, Florida—the nation’s oldest city. [Martin Dobrow]

PART 2: August 28, 1565, St. Augustine, Florida

Our beginning was decades before our alleged beginning.

More than two generations ahead of the Pilgrims’ arrival on the Mayflower at Plymouth Rock in 1620, or that “first” slave ship at Point Comfort, Virginia, in 1619. More than 40 years before the British arrived in Jamestown as the first permanent English settlement in 1607.

On August 28, 1565, the Spanish galleon carrying Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and some 800 others (including, almost certainly, African slaves) sighted land off the coast of future Florida. They had been at sea for a turbulent month, and…ahoy: green at last.

Noting the Catholic history deep in his heart, Menéndez recognized that August 28 was also the “Feast Day” of the great African theologian: St. Augustine of Hippo (who had died on August 28, 430).

And so it came to pass, more than two centuries before our nation became our nation, that the oldest city in that future nation—the longest continually occupied European settlement in the United States—would be named St. Augustine.

Our original city was named for an African man.

Emmet Till in 1954, a year before his fateful trip to Mississippi. [Photograph by Mamie Till-Bradley, first published by the Chicago Defender, 1955; public domain.]

PART 3: August 28, 1955, Mississippi

Three hundred ninety years later, in the wee hours of another August 28, another indelible chapter of American history was written.

That is when 14-year-old Emmett Till was kidnapped from his uncle’s home in rural Mississippi, absolutely brutalized, and discarded in the Tallahatchie River, the blade from a cotton gin tied to his neck. His body was dumped in a coffin, nailed shut, and shipped back to Chicago, where his heartbroken mother, Mamie Till-Bradley, was waiting.

She insisted on prying open the coffin and staring at the ghastly image of his mangled face. She encouraged America to look, too, allowing a photographer from Jet magazine to take pictures. “I wanted the world to see,” she said at the time, “what they did to my baby.”

Along with Rosa Parks’ courageous decision to not give up her seat on a Montgomery bus a few months later, these images helped launch the modern civil rights movement.

Irwin Brunson in 2025. [Lenny Foster]

PART 4: August 28, 1963 (once again), St. Augustine and Washington, DC

From the heartache, I return to the hope. This was King’s greatest heroism, I believe: the way he fought almost every day for optimism. Not a blind or naïve optimism. Not an optimism that denied evil or despair, but a bending toward the light as an act of building a better world. He fought a daily battle against his own fatalism, and he generally won that hard fight.

He motivated ordinary people to attempt extraordinary things.

I begin my new book (Original City, Original Sin: King, the Klan, and the Fight for Civil Rights in St. Augustine, Florida) right here on August 28, 1963.

We see the wonders of that day through people like Irwin Brunson and Kathryn Fentress.

A rising fourth grader and the son of two deaf parents, Irwin had registration on August 28, 1963 at the Fullerwood Elementary School, where he was about to become one of the first five Black children to enroll at the previously all-white school. He marveled that day at all the books on the shelves in the Fullerwood library. He watched the news that night on a black-and-white television, noting the way even his parents rejoiced at the coverage of Dr. King, though they could not hear any of his majestic words.

A rising sophomore at Duke University who lived just south of St. Augustine, Kathryn took a bus up to the March on Washington—the only white person on it. She found herself mesmerized by King’s words on the National Mall: sensing “this feeling of connectedness and unity and incredible hope.”

The year ahead would dramatically change both of their lives. It would dramatically change America. (You can read much more about it—and/or preorder the book—at www.civilwriter.com.)

Katherine Fentress in 2023. [Courtesy of Katherine Fentress]

PART 5: August 28, 2026

Here we are now, 63 years later, on another August 28 in our nation’s 250^th year.

May we acknowledge that our hard history is part of our true history.

Let us look unflinchingly in that Reflecting Pool, and summon the magic of Dr. King, bending toward the light, and making the choice to be guided by those better angels.