When I saw the two pendant necklaces, they brought back memories. I had one like them years ago, wearing it to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
The pendant is a simple inexpensive piece of jewelry. It holds a tiny portrait of King inside a circular clear plastic bubble with metal loops around the edges. On the flip side is the title of the infamous speech he gave on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on Washington: “I have a dream. Southern Christian Leadership Conference.” The rotating pendant hangs loosely from a circular metal ring.
The gold finish on both of the auction pendants and their cheap chains had long rubbed off. King’s photo was tilted on one of them, and both had some scratches.
I don’t know what happened to mine, but I’m sure that the owner of these had worn them as proudly as me.
I’m also not sure when these pendants were made; some sites guessed that they were from 1960s. That makes sense. Perhaps the SCLC sold them to raise money, or a private retailer to make money. Googling, I found that there are a lot of pendants for sale that bear the “I have a dream” phrase, which King had used before the Washington march.
During a freedom rally in Detroit in June 1963, he had spoken about his dream of a united country. On that August day in Washington in 1963, Mahalia Jackson, his favorite singer, urged him to revisit it.
Jackson was on the stage when King gave his prepared speech. At one point as he waited for the cheering to die down, she shouted, “Tell them about the dream, Martin. Tell them about the dream,” as his speechwriter and advisor Clarence Jones remembered it. King moved the speech aside and began preaching about the dream.
“Talking some months later of his decision to include the passage, King said: ‘I started out reading the speech, and I read it down to a point. The audience response was wonderful that day … And all of a sudden this thing came to me that … I’d used many times before … ‘I have a dream.’ And I just felt that I wanted to use it here … I used it, and at that point I just turned aside from the manuscript altogether. I didn’t come back to it.'”
As for the pendant, it’s not worth much except for its historical value and its connection to a pivotal period in the timeline of the country.
