Fifty years ago today in Washington, DC, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. electrified the nation

By Georgett Roberts, Reuven Fenton, Jennifer Bain and Bruce Golding They boarded buses, climbed into cars and rode the rails in the pre-dawn darkness to travel south and become a part of history.

Fifty years ago today, tens of thousands of New Yorkers swelled the ranks of the estimated 250,000 civil-rights marchers who thronged the National Mall in Washington DC and heard Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his famed “I Have a Dream” speech — and it forever changed their lives.

“When I listened to him, I felt trembles going down my spine,” recalled retired sanitation worker Robert Walton, 88, of Far Rockaway.

“It touched me. I felt empowered. It made me feel like I was an American citizen.”

“As long as I live I will never forget that day,” he added.

Lewis Phillips, 85, of Harlem, was serving in the U.S. Army Reserves in upstate Watertown when he learned about the march the night before.

“I figured this was going to be important. King was important to black people and I was a black person,” he said.

So at 1 a.m., Phillips begged his captain for permission to go.

“He said, ‘You can take off,’ so I took off. I had a 190 Mercedes and I shot down there and got to Washington at about 8 o’clock in the morning,” he said.

“I had to park quite a ways away –- several miles. Somebody picked me up and I was telling him the story that I’d driven all the way from Watertown.”

After arriving at the mall, Phillips said, the place was so packed that “it took me about a half-hour to go a block’s distance.”

“I was weaving around the crowd, trying to get as close as I could. Then I got an idea that I could climb up this tree….So I climbed the tree. No big deal,” he said.

“On people’s faces you could see hope that everything was going to be all right. And there was singing, and all that. A lot of people were crying. It was an emotional thing.”

Harlem drug-store worker Elliot Ferebee belonged to Local 1199, whose members were excited to join the “March on Washington” and decided to go as a group, taking a five-hour ride on a stifling train from Penn Station.

And while Ferebee, now 90 and living in Jamaica, was initially just looking forward to a day off from work, the enormity of the event hit him with full force once he saw the Lincoln Memorial.

“That’s the man who freed the slaves,” he recalled thinking to himself.

“This march is the next step towards full equality, and Martin Luther King Jr. is the next man to carry the torch.”

But after four hours standing in the crowd under the blazing summer sun, Ferebee and several other union members couldn’t stand the heat any longer and pushed their way back to return to the railroad station.

Shortly after settling into a train car, King’s speech was broadcast over the loudspeakers.

“It wasn’t just the heat of that day — his words made me melt inside. It was very emotional, even for a bunch of tough union men. We didn’t cry though!” he said with a chuckle.

Ferebee’s live-in companion, Virgie Blake, 88, was invited to the march by a friend who worked as a Head Start organizer and got her a seat on a school bus packed with teachers and school administrators.

The bus dropped off the passengers in Washington, where they had to take a subway ride to Pennsylvania Avenue.

By the time she arrived at the mall, there were already hundreds of thousands of people chanting and singing spiritual songs.

“We were so far back on the south side of the pool, I couldn’t hear a thing. We were in the cheap seats. When Martin Luther King stood up to talk everyone cheered after every single word he said,” she recalled.

“We couldn’t hear what was said, but we knew it was good because everyone was so happy and carrying on.”

Antique-furniture restorer Elliott Ramsey of Harlem was waiting to join the U.S. Marine Corps when he rode to Washington on a bus rented by a group of Masons in Philadelphia, where he lived then.

“We got there early in the morning, about 5:30,” he said.

“The crowd got larger and larger and larger, it really did. It was like a rainbow of all different types of people.”

Ramsey, 68, said he stood on the left side of the Reflecting Pool, “about a football field’s distance away.”

“But the sound system was very good and we could see. King was electrifying,” he recalled.

“He was very prophetic too; what he spoke about actually came about. And looking back on it, it’s almost like he knew he had a limited time.”

One group of activists from the Congress of Racial Equality in Brooklyn actually arrived in Washington after walking the entire way, including Lawrence Cumberbatch, who at 16 was the youngest among them.

“It took 13 days. It was an adventure really,” said Cumberbatch, now a lawyer.

“I went to Sammy’s Army and Navy store and bought my quote-unquote walking shoes — these semi-construction boots that were worn out by the time I made it to Washington.”

“At one campsite, the shoes actually starting melting. I thought they were leather but instead they were this cheap plastic,” he noted.

When the hikers — wearing sweatshirts hand-lettered with the words”Freedom Now” — arrived at the Washington Monument, “officials announced us and escorted us to the podium,” Cumberbatch said.

“We were so amazed by seeing this massive, massive amount of people –it was like being a kid opening up a Christmas present. We were shaking hands and slapping fives,” he said.

“None of us even really absorbed any of the speeches, we were so taken aback by the whole thing.”

David Jones was 15 and living in Crown Heights when he found out his parents were letting his older sister go to the march, and “I immediately said, ‘Why can she go and I can’t?’”

Riding on a bus full of young people, “everyone was chattering,” said Jones, now president and CEO of the Community Service Society of New York anti-poverty organization.

“We weren’t just going to Coney Island. Everyone knew that this was going to be something unique. So that I remember — real excitement,” he said.

Once in Washington, Jones wormed his way to a spot “pretty close” to stage, with a clear view of King.

“You had a lot of young people like me, who were not the most quiet people in the world, but the whole crowd quieted as he began his speech,” Jones said.

On the ride back, “I remember everyone falling asleep. Everyone was exhausted,” he said.

Former model Audrey Smaltz, who was working at Bloomingdale’s at the time, got to travel in style after asking for two days off to attend the march.

“My boss was very afraid for me to go. It was the 60’s revolution. People were being murdered where crowds were gathering,” she said.

But Smaltz said, “I was 26 years old and I was not afraid,” and her boss gave her $30 to fly round-trip on Eastern Airlines from LaGuardia Airport to Washington, where she met her boyfriend, who was one of King’s lawyers and got her a spot in a reserved seating area.

“That day in 1963, I was wearing a peach-colored dress, high-heeled shoes and had white gloves with me,” she recalled.

“We were all dressed elegantly. There were no sneakers or T-shirts.”

After the speech, Smaltz attended a house party where “we ate and danced in the basement,” then went to spend the night at the Dupont Plaza hotel, where she ran into King in the lobby.

“He asked me what did I think of his speech, and I said I loved it,” she recalled.

Rayna Cuffee, who lives on Central Park West but is originally from California, got to sit in the VIP section facing the stage because her sister worked for King in Los Angeles. Then 30, she attended the event with her husband and 9-year-old son.

“I had driven down the day before and we went to the airport to meet my sister’s plane,” Cuffee said.

“All the stars were on it. (Harry) Belafonte, (Sidney) Poitier, Lena Horne, Sammy (Davis Jr.), Paul Newman, Chalton Heston.”

At the mall, Cuffee said: “I sat in the third row. Diahann Carroll was right in front of me.”

“I didn’t realize what was behind me but then I stood up and looked and I said, Wow. There were so many people. I was in awe of the crowd,” she said.

“I thought the speech would survive forever, but I never thought the day would be celebrated 50 years later.”

Naomi Hart, then 14, said she “wanted to go to the march with my church, but my mother didn’t want me to go.”

“She was worried it would get violent, but I didn’t worry about that. I said to her, ‘I’ve been shopping for you since I was 11,” she said.

“My dad convinced her I should go. He said it would be an experience for me.”

Hart said her church’s bus left at 5 p.m., and it seemed like there were “a million people on the road.”

“So many buses, and we all waved to each other. When we arrived it was just so crowded. You had to park and walk miles to get there,” she said.

“We stood in the middle and we could hear everything. We were close enough that I could see him….It was a spiritual feeling, and to see history being made was awesome.”

Retired Sarah Lawrence College professor Arnold Krupat recalled singing “We Shall Overcome” while marching to the mall from a parking lot in Virginia after riding a bus from Union Square with a group of labor organizers.

“As we marched, I had my arms crossed over my chest, and both of my hands were clutching the hands of black people,” said Krupat, who is white.

“I can’t say if I was in tears or near tears, but I had never had that feeling, before or since.”

As his bus left Virginia hours later, however, Krupat said it was fired upon by a bunch of white men with rifles who were perched on an overpass.

“It was a reminder that there were people who weren’t going to take our peaceful protest lightly…. that there were people who didn’t want to see us holding hands and singing,” said Krupat, 71.

Additional reporting by Lorena Mongelli and Frank Rosario

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