Pizzas galore!

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned discrimination in employment and the 1965 Voting Rights Acts restored and protected black voting rights, nearly a century after Peterson’s first vote.

The rising hope was personified by Martin Luther King, the Baptist minister whose extraordinary natural oratory and energetic leadership of the civil rights movement earned him the Nobel Peace Prize at the age of 36. King was prominent in organising the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, to dramatise the appalling poverty and discrimination against blacks in Southern states and to demand civil rights legislation.

More than quarter of a million people massed for the largest demonstration in Washington’s history, to hear King deliver his “I Have Dream Speech”, a masterpiece of public speaking that would offer a frame the civil rights movement in the same way that Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address had captured the moral momentum behind the civil war.

“I have a dream,” he said, “that one day, down in Alabama, with it vicious racists . . . one day, right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”

Times Archive, 1963: Let freedom ring

'All this will end one day. We will hew hope out of the mountain of despair'

• Topic: The assassination of Martin Luther King

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This year pollsters predicted a record turnout of as much as 81 per cent in the state of Alabama, after black residents registered to vote in record numbers.

The protesters marched from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, but not before the first attempt to do so had been broken up by police using teargas and clubs. Footage of the violence would outrage public opinion as never before.

With hindsight, black rights were also marching forward, but it did not always feel like that on the ground. “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” declared George Wallace, Governor of Alabama.

Progress came soaked in the blood of African-American martyrs: Medgar Evers, field director of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, holding a banner that read “Jim Crow Must Go”, was shot dead by a member of the KKK outside his home; Martin Luther King was killed while standing on a motel balcony in Memphis, sparking riots in more than 100 American cities.

The political power of African-America swelled gradually, and hope rose. In 1967 Thurgood Marshall, the son of a railroad porter, became the first African-American to join the Supreme Court.

In 1983 Jesse Jackson ran for president. In 1989 Colin Powell became the first African-American to head the Armed Forces, and then later the nation’s first black Secretary of State.

In 1995 the Nation of Islam convened the Million Man March on Washington, in a powerful demonstration of African-American political engagement.

The following year a young lawyer named Barack Obama was elected to the Illinois State Senate. In the same year that Peterson cast his vote, Hiram Revels became the first African-American in the US Senate; 135 years later, Mr Obama would become only the fifth.

The pace of political change for black Americans had been, up until that moment, impossibly slow; but in the three years since then, it has seemed to move with impossible swiftness.

In his “I Have a Dream” Speech, Martin Luther King spoke of the promise of equality enshrined in the Constitution. “America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of colour are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds’.”

Yesterday American voters — black and white — symbolically honoured the unpaid debt in a way that Martin Luther King could only have dreamt of.

In 1870 Tom Peterson thought the world had changed forever, and he was wrong. Today, millions around the world will feel the same, and they will be right.

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