Updated September 25, 2025 at 3:49 PM CDT
On a hot summer day a little over six decades ago, a quarter of a million people gathered peacefully in Washington, D.C. to demand laws to advance civil rights, protect voting rights and stop employment discrimination.
It was there, at the March on Washington, that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his celebrated "I Have A Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28, 1963.
King's preparations with his close allies for that pivotal moment are the subject of Chess Jakobs' new play The American Five, which runs through Oct. 12 at Ford's Theatre in the U.S. capital.
Morning Edition host Michel Martin spoke with Jakobs and actor Ro Boddie, who plays King, during a rehearsal break as they finalized the production.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Michel Martin: Chess, I'm going to start with you because you are an actor and you are a producer. But this is your first play.
Chess Jakobs: It is.
Martin: What is it about this story that captivated you?
Jakobs: In originally writing this play, it was actually a play of three acts that had 15 different characters in it. And I was exploring the relationship between Black and Jewish and queer people and women, not only on civil rights, but kind of like in our current time. So I went from 1963 all the way to today.
Martin: So it was an epic.
Jakobs: Yes. I think when we read the first script, it took four hours to get through and it was called a Symphony of Plays. And so exploring kind of like all of those themes across all of these times, I decided to focus on the more historic side.
Martin: But why that particular chapter?
Jakobs: For me to write about the present time, I have the future to do that, but especially as my debut play starting with the history is super important to me. I'm a researcher as well. I really love history. And so being able to bring my experience as a theater artist and being a historian at the same time, I feel like I had the most meat and potatoes to work with going back and then starting my journey.
Martin: So The American Five. It's five actors who represent historic figures. Just briefly, who are the five?
Jakobs: So we have the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King, Bayard Rustin, Stanley Levison and Clarence B. Jones.
Martin: And people know who the Kings are. I'm not sure the other three are as well known. Bayard Rustin, one of the great strategists and the principal organizer, who was gay.
Jakobs: Yes, openly gay. In the 1960s, so a pioneer for simply that fact alone, on top of all of the organizing work that he did. And then you have Stanley Levison, who helped co-write one of the first drafts of the "I Have a Dream" speech and was a businessman/attorney/fundraiser for King and a literary agent. And then you have Clarence B. Jones, who was also considered just such a titan for being an established attorney at that age, at that time, having graduated from Columbia, gone to [Boston University School of Law] and gave up his life working as an entertainment attorney in L.A. to come and work on civil rights. So you have these people who committed their lives to this movement.
Martin: They did all play a role in the March on Washington. Do you know whether they actually did have dinner one night or many nights to kind of work on the drafts and the organizing?
Jakobs: From reading memoirs and research, there are several mentioning them getting together over dinner, of them even singing together sometimes. Dr. King actually loved to cook. He loved to make smothered greens.
Martin: So the events are imagined but it's all based on reality.
Jakobs: Right, exactly. So essentially what I did was look at events based on history and then like a coloring book color in what might have been right about all historical figures they don't talk about in most of our historical books. The curious mind in me as an artist is wondering what are all of the factors in history that would lead to the conversation happening in those moments.
Martin: Ro, I'm going to turn to you because you're getting ready to go before an audience as Martin Luther King Jr. who's only one of the most famous people in modern history, and certainly, at least among many segments of the American population, one of the most revered. No pressure at all.
Ro Boddie: Yeah. No, no, no.
Martin: What drew you to this role? And what are you exploring in it that is interesting to you as an actor?
Boddie: Well, I've had the privilege of playing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. four times now. This will be the fourth production, and that's not including other times in which I've done developmental readings. And for some reason he just keeps coming back into my life.
Martin: You think it's your voice?
Boddie: I think it's my height, it's my voice. So I've got that in my favor. But, you know, it's a privilege. I'm not interested in doing an imitation. I'm interested in working from the inside out and bringing out the humanity of who he was and the essence.
Martin: Is it ever intimidating?
Boddie: No, it's not intimidating because we all have our idea of who he was. I had my idea of who he was. What's beautiful about what Chess has written is that it breaks all of those ideas, all of those preconceived notions. Because, to quote James Brown, it costs to be the boss. He [King] suffered from depression and morbidity. So I think it's important for people to see the struggles that he faced with trying to get civil rights.
Martin: Why do you think that's important?
Boddie: I think that it's important for us to see great people as human and bring them down so that we can say, oh, if this great person who has flaws like anybody else can do great things, maybe so can I.
Martin: Chess, a similar question for you. The speech is certainly well known. School kids memorize it and deliver it. There are "I Have a Dream" speech contests all over the country. What is it that you wanted to bring to this story that you feel adds to what people think they know?
Jakobs: Well, there's history and then there's hidden history. And then there's the humans behind the hidden history. And for me, I think the humans behind the hidden history is always what's so fascinating. And actually, for people that I consider iconic, like these American five, it's one of the reasons why I fall in love with them even more, not only as icons, but as people. So when you go and look back and see that someone like Bayard Rustin, you know, was out and publicly gay in the 1950s and 1960s, convicted of charges and still was persevering and found the wherewithal to keep going.
Martin: Or Stanley Levison, who was under surveillance his entire life.
Jakobs: And then decided that he was going to work for Dr. King behind the radar. Right. For me, I really respect these people because of the well of resilience that they had. It's not just the wealth of resilience that they had based on how much they were knocked down on the work that they were doing. But doing that on top of all of the very human things we go through at home, like raising families, like being in marriages, like managing friendships, like running organizations, doing all of that and still finding the 35 hours in a day to work and advocate for and stand up civil rights for the nation, for me speaks volumes. So that in today's time, when we feel like we don't have the 30 minutes to go out and advocate, when we don't have the time to go to a city council meeting. We don't have the time to show up for our families, that we recognize that it took this level of commitment to have the rights that we have today.
Martin: Is that what you wanted to get out of it in a way to sort of motivate people to think about the present moment?
Jakobs: I have a canvas of hopes for what people get out of this show. Another part for me is to see the different kinds of people from the different places in America that it took for this kind of work to be possible. And I think this idea of the five, that we have is a queer man, we have a wealthy Black man. We have a woman who was a sharecropper. We have Dr. King, who grew up in a low-income preaching family.
Martin: We have a woman who has dreams of her own, who at a time when a lot of women didn't go to college had two degrees and who clearly was a presence in her own right.
Jakobs: Absolutely. One of the hopes that I have is for people to see that and know that it's not just this archetype or specific profile of a person who is an advocate, who stands up for other people, who works on behalf of others. It's the collaboration and the coalition building across all of these different kinds of people that made this specific thing possible that I think speaks volumes to the world that we have to facilitate and grow and advocate within right now.
Martin: So 1963 was a landmark year. It was also a very traumatic and violent year. A couple months before the March on Washington, the NAACP first field secretary in Mississippi was gunned down in his own driveway in Jackson, Miss. Just a month later, after the march, the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed in Birmingham, killing the four little girls. And then a few months after that, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. And I'm just wondering how you take people back to that time.
Jakobs: Well, I don't think I let myself exist out of that mindset. I'm always considering the fact that because I'm here dancing in a gay bar with my friends who represent the mosaic of the world, somebody did die so that I could have this right. Somebody got hosed down. Somebody ran away from a plantation. All of these things happened in order for me to be in this room right now.
Martin: So before we let you go, we're speaking with you at Ford's Theatre. It is here that President Lincoln was assassinated. The theater, in addition to being a functioning theater, is a living tribute to Lincoln. And the March on Washington was actually planned to coincide with the centennial of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. So I wanted to ask, what's the significance of the fact that this play will be performed here?
Boddie: For me, just being here where the Great Emancipator was, I couldn't think of a better time to be doing a history play and to have this play be done just a few feet from where that event took place. And to have all of these giants in there, I hope it shifts the air a little bit.
Chess: And that's one of the reasons why this show is called The American Five, because these are people who fought for the rights of Americans in very broad and daring ways.
The broadcast version of this story was produced by Ana Perez. The digital version was edited by Obed Manuel.
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