WENDI THOMAS

Saturday’s oratory a pale echo of King’s soaring words in 1963.

WASHINGTON — I listened closely, but the words never came.

At the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom Saturday, I wanted to hear a phrase to fuel the next generation of civil rights activists.

It would need to be pithy enough fit on a poster, a T-shirt or in a tweet.

You know, something like “I have a dream.”

Big enough to hold everything — all the unanswered demands of the original march in 1963, which echo and overlap the 21st-century additions: an increase in the minimum wage, better public schools, true voting rights, repeal of “Stand Your Ground” laws, an end to racial profiling and disproportionate drug sentencing, equality for women, gays and lesbians, Asians, Latinos and the disabled, just for starters.

But ambiguous enough to mean anything. Easily co-opted by those who talk nice, but napalm visions of justice.

Sturdy enough to survive until the 50th anniversary of the 50th anniversary because in 2063, there will still be cause to march.

But that magical phrase didn’t come from any of the dozens of speakers who took the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, where Dr. Martin Luther King stood on Aug. 28, 1963, to tell us about his dream.

U. S. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr.; Janet Murguia, president of the National Council of La Raza; House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who marched in 1963; Medgar Evers’ widow Myr-

lie Evers Williams, who was kept from the original march because of a travel delay; Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers; Terry O’Neill of National Organization for Women; Alexis Johnson of Planned Parenthood — none of them came close to the soaring oratory we’ve come to expect when we think we’ve gathered to make history.

Newark, N.J., Mayor and U. S. Senate candidate Cory Booker showed promise when he warned against “sedentary agitation,” getting angry but never getting up, but then he was done.

Rev. Lennox Yearwood of the Hip Hop Caucus was getting a rhythm going, until he screeched right off the record. His brief exegesis of a rap song implied that Lil Wayne’s lyric “Look me in my face, I ain’t got no worries,” spoke to the courage required of those who struggle for justice. (The next line extols mushrooms — the hallucinogenic kind, not the kind you sauté.)

More than a few speakers (interestingly, mostly women) were cut off by music, the kind they play at award shows when you’ve gone over your allotted time, which for most speakers Saturday was two minutes.

Maybe the pithy wis- dom I sought was in words that were never spoken.

Maybe the words were drowned out by applause when a speaker hit a stride, like author and radio show host Dr. Michael Eric Dyson and his refrain: “He had a dream, we need a team!”

Rhymes are inherently popular and at 91, Rev. Joseph Lowery, a founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, knows that.

“We come to Washington to commemorate, we’re going back home to agitate!” he said. (When the crowd didn’t parrot him back loudly, he questioned the quality of our internal auditory mechanisms.)

U. S. Rep. John Lewis, who in 1963 was the youngest speaker and Saturday was the only surviving speaker, told us Saturday to “stand up, stand out, speak up and get in the way.”

But no one stirred my spirit like King does every time I listen to what he said that day, whether he borrowed parts from past sermons, the national anthem, Scripture or an old Negro spiritual.

Time has airbrushed Aug. 28, 1963, into this mystical, magical moment.

That King or his oratory could ever be duplicated, replicated or approximated, maybe that too is a dream.