When Martin
Luther King, Jr., named so many separate states in his speech, he not only connected with his
audience, but he also subtly advocated for a federal solution to the problem of racial
discrimination. The setting of the speech was at a March on Washington that drew more than
200,000 people, the largest gathering to ever convene in Washington, D.C., at that time (1963).
People from all around the country had made an effort to attend the March, particularly civil
rights activists from Southern states. He specifically addresses those attendees when he says,
"Go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to
Louisiana" with hope in their hearts that change is coming. Not only that, but legislators
and sympathizers, both black and white, also attended, and by naming some northern states later,
such as New Hampshire and New York, and the western state of California, he acknowledged that
people from all around the country were listening to him and supporting the cause of racial
equality.
By naming such a wide variety of states in his speech, one could
say that Martin Luther King, Jr., was trying to "make a federal case" out of racial
discrimination. That saying means exaggerating something trivial, which his opponents in the
South no doubt believed he was doing. But to take the phrase literally, because some Southern
states had implemented Jim Crow laws with impunity, the solution seemed to be to get the federal
government involved to outlaw such discriminatory practices and improve the possibility of black
people rising to political positions in those states. Ultimately the Voting Rights Act of 1965
was a national solution to the problems posed by certain Southern states that had the most
egregious anti-black policies. Naming not only the offending states but also the friendlier
states was a way to make the problems black people faced a national issue, not just a state
issue.
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