It was at the steps of Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on a late-summer day 61 years ago when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream became The Dream.
More than 250,000 gathered on the mall in the nation’s capital, right in front of the marble edifice honoring a president who would die for the cause in trying to mend a torn country.
Just five years later, King, too, would be dead from an assassin’s bullet in attempt of the same, but on this day, he was alive, in the moment.
Even if the preacher was grasping a bit, at first, not quite summoning his signature King-connect of oratorical and theological magic.
Meanwhile, the believers and sojourners, the faithful and the foot soldiers, kept arriving.
They poured into that hallowed expanse in the nation’s capital, transforming it, on the afternoon of Aug. 28, 1963, into the world’s largest church service.
Appropriately, it took the mighty voice of Mahalia Jackson, the legendary gospel singer, to hone it, and bring it home.
“Tell them about the dream, Martin!” she sang out, from right behind him at the podium.
“The dream! Tell ‘em!”
Jackson, whose capacity for social justice was just as abundant as her singing voice, was long baptized in the crusade for civil rights.
Of course, she was going to accompany him to Washington that day.
She was taken by King in his quieter moments, when he would tell congregants and committee men alike, of the gentle image always spied in his mind’s eye.
It was comforting. Little Black kids and little white kids, being just that.
Kids.
Friends.
Playing together, with no reprisals.
Except, this wasn’t a time to be quiet.
Miss Mahalia’s voice pealed like a church bell on Sunday morning,
“Martin! The dream!”
And when he heard, and when he broke from his words on the prepared page, that’s when he really started preaching.
That’s when he invoked the gossamer beginnings of what was really an American Prayer, more than anything.
“I have a dream,” the preacher and soon-to-be martyr said, his voice rising, “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.”
“That’s the quote that’s really stayed with me,” Kip Price said the other day, from his home in Monongah, Marion County, as he reflected on Monday’s federal holiday for the slain civil rights leader.
“Back in Piedmont, we lived that,” he said.
“That’s how we grew up. That’s how we were taught. You judge by the content of character.”
Piedmont, his hometown in Mineral County, gave the world Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor, historian and PBS mainstay whom everyone knows; and Aubrey James Stewart – Mister Aubrey – who had been lost to history for generations.
“Mister Aubrey put me on my path,” Price said.
If you don’t already know Piedmont’s other son, you can just call Kip Price north-central West Virginia’s chief spokesman and advocate for The Greatest Generation.
“I’ll take it,” he said, chuckling.
“I just wanted to honor our World War II veterans. They’re true heroes, every single one. If we didn’t have them, we wouldn’t have a country today.”
For Price, it started with the aforementioned Stewart, a Black man who was 36 and had a good job at the paper mill in Piedmont, which, at the time, was an employment normally reserved for whites.
While everyone got along in Piedmont, there was still a separation of race.
Sure, that line was blurred a lot from neighborly friendship and shared experience – but it was still there.
At the height of the fighting in World War II, Stewart, who was standing in the doorway of middle age and could have retired from the mill, mustered into the Army, instead.
“He enlisted,” Price said.
“The draft cutoff was 28. He didn’t have to go.”
Stewart’s unit, the all-Black 333rd Field Artillery, would soon be going all-in.
Of love and war, in black and white
In the America of 1944, Black people couldn’t drink from the same water fountains as whites.
They couldn’t stay at the same hotels as whites, and they couldn’t sit next to whites in movie theaters.
But in the European Theater of War, sepia-toned units like the 333rd were fighting bravely against the lethal racism of the Third Reich, an ocean away from the unwinnable war they were dealing with at home.
Dec. 17, 1944, was the second day of fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, Hitler’s all-out surprise assault on the Allies.
The push would claim 75,000 American lives — including Mister Aubrey and his 10 buddies in the 333rd.
“They basically sacrificed themselves,” Price said, “and they probably saved a whole village when they gave themselves up like that.”
Under heavy shelling, Mister Aubrey and the others had become separated from their unit.
With just two rifles between them, they double-timed and slogged through deep snow — until they couldn’t go any more.
They stumbled into Wereth, a tiny Belgian village of divided loyalties. They gave a tentative rap on the door of the first farmhouse they saw.
It was the home of the village’s mayor, Mathias Langer.
He cautiously looked around and welcomed 11 shivering soldiers inside.
Langer didn’t care what color his guests were.
They were Americans, and he was anti-Nazi.
All he needed to know.
He didn’t want his two teenaged sons fighting and dying for the Third Reich.
They were hiding in the hayloft of his barn, along with two other German soldiers who deserted.
Upstairs, an infant slept in his crib.
The last full measure …
At the table, Langer served coffee, and warm bread and butter, to 11 grateful Americans. It was the only thing he had to offer. In turn, his guests proffered the only thing they could: A bar of soap.
Then, another knock. Someone else had also been looking.
Langer opened the door to regard a different group of soldiers — and these, he most certainly didn’t want in his house.
Someone had tipped the Schutzstaffel, Hitler’s elite and fearsome force known across Europe as the SS.
A month later, Langer and others found 11 mutilated bodies in a nearby pasture when the snow started melting.
Rob Child, a Philadelphia filmmaker who would later tell the story in a docudrama, picks up the account.
He wrote the screenplay, in fact.
When the SS patrol showed up, Mister Aubrey and the others simply put their hands in the air.
They actually outnumbered that patrol, Child said.
And they still had the two rifles. Why didn’t they fight?
“They were in a house with young children and a baby,” Child said.
“They wanted to protect the family,” the director and screenwriter continued.
“They knew when they walked out that door they were walking to their deaths. This was a war about exterminating certain races. And they were Black.”
Hermann Langer, one of those sons who was undercover in plain sight, watched from the loft as the Americans were forcibly led from the farmhouse, being taunted by their captors the whole way.
In the aftermath, villagers saw what the soldiers had endured.
Their faces were slashed, and many of them had been stabbed repeatedly with bayonets and shot multiple times.
A finger of one of the 11 was partially amputated. James Aubrey Stewart died of a fractured skull — in a blow that was likely delivered by a rifle butt.
Back home in Piedmont, Mister Aubrey’s parents received a form letter telling them their son died in combat.
It was around 1996, when Hermann Langer, no longer a scared teenager hiding from Hitler, put up a cross in that field to mark the spot.
Squaring history and breaking bread (again)
Fifty-two years later, word of what really happened, finally, started getting out.
A cousin back home in Piedmont told Price after talking to one of Mister’s Aubrey’s nephews and seeing a brief segment on a Washington, D.C., television newscast.
“They were heroes,” Price said.
“They needed to be honored. West Virginia needed to know what they did for that family and that village. The world needed to know.”
Price, who grew up four houses down from Mister Aubrey’s on the same street, started a foundation with his cousin and others around Piedmont and the region.
That led to a contact with Child and with West Virginia lawmakers who would go on to sponsor and pass a Congressional resolution honoring the sacrifice of the soldiers, now forever enshrined in the American record as, “The Wereth 11.”
In 2011, Price traveled to Belgium, where one afternoon, he found himself at a table in the still-standing Langer farmhouse. It was at that very table where Mister Aubrey and 10 other heroes had sat, in fact.
Hermann Langer smiled as he passed a platter of fresh-baked bread to Price, another Black man from a place called Piedmont who came calling.
Nothing but net
Price was born in Washington state, where his father, who was just back from the fighting in Korea, was finishing his hitch in the military.
His mother was from Louisiana and consented to go to her husband’s exotic (to her) Mineral County home in the mountains.
Kip got along with everybody at Piedmont High.
He brought home good grades and became part of yearbook lore, even.
That’s when, with his nervous knees going all over the place, he strode to the free throw line on the court of the Charleston Civic Center and sunk two – to help Piedmont ice it over Marsh Fork in the final round of the 1974 Single A West Virginia Basketball Championship.
Along the way, he came to Fairmont and then-Fairmont State College, where he didn’t know if he wanted to be a math teacher or history teacher.
The paycheck prevailed.
A part-time summer job turned into full-time employment at the Rivesville Power Station, where he retired a couple of years back as a materials manager.
He eventually went back to Fairmont State to earn a Regents Bachelor of Arts degree based on his work and life experience.
‘Talk about content of character’
With the response to the Wereth 11, he started thinking about the others around Marion County who also wore the uniform in World War II.
There was Fred DeMary, who landed on Utah Beach on D-Day with his twin brother, Leo.
The Italian-American siblings just wanted to make it back home, so they could go back to work at DeMary’s Market, their family grocery store that is still in business in Rivesville today.
And Asa Davison, a Black man who fought in the South Pacific, and came back to Fairmont to eventually be a successful businessman and benefactor to people, no matter their pigment.
There’s that trio, and countless others.
Over the years, Price has taken the in-twilight veterans of that long-ago war to elementary schools, churches, Rotary meetings and other venues – where he steps back and lets them do the talking.
“I want people to know about them,” he said.
“I want people to know their stories and what they went through. I guess I turned into a history teacher, after all.”
Because black or white, for better or worse, they all wore the uniform, he said.
And most of them, he said, didn’t know if their stories for all eternity were going to be told by a flag-draped coffin and a faded gold star in a window.
Some, Mister Aubrey included, were fighting for rights not always accorded to them.
“Talk about content of character. That’s it, right there.”
