When Baptist preachers get particularly moved, many of them have a habit of taking their right foot as they’re standing and rubbing it up and down the lower part of their left leg. “He took the written text that he had been reading from and moved it to the left side of the lectern, grabbed both hands of the lectern, and looked out to the thousands of people out there, and that’s when he started speaking extemporaneously. King’s back was to me as he was speaking, but I could hear and see him,” Jones tells TIME. “What most people don’t know is that she shouted to him as he was speaking, ‘Martin! Tell them about the dream! Martin, tell them about the dream!’ I was there. So it’s not a surprise that after she performed “How I Got Over” and “I’ve Been ‘Buked and I’ve Been Scorned” at the march, she stuck close by through what would turn out to be one of his most important speeches. “He would lean back, close his eyes, and tears would run down his face as she would sing to him.” “When he would get very down and depressed, he would ask his secretary Dora McDonald to get Mahalia on the phone,” he says. She was one of his most trusted advisors - and an informal therapist of sorts, as Jones frames it. Some credit goes to the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, King’s former legal counsel Clarence B.
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