"I Have a Dream" is a public speech that was delivered by American civil rights activist and Baptist minister Martin Luther King Jr. during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. In the speech, King called for civil and economic rights and an end to legalized racism in the United States. Delivered to over 250,000 civil rights supporters from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., the speech was one of the most famous moments of the civil rights movement and among the most iconic speeches in American history.
Beginning with a reference to the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared millions of slaves free in 1863,Echols, James (2004), I Have a Dream: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Future of Multicultural America. King said: "one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free".Alexandra Alvarez, "Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream': The Speech Event as Metaphor", Journal of Black Studies 18(3); . Toward the end of the speech, King departed from his prepared text for an improvised peroration on the theme "I have a dream". In the church spirit, Mahalia Jackson lent her support from her seat behind him, shouting, "Tell 'em about the dream, Martin!" just before he began his most famous segment of the speech. Taylor Branch writes that King later said he grasped at the "first run of oratory" that came to him, not knowing if Jackson's words ever reached him.Branch, Taylor, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–63, pgs. 2761–2763, Simon & Schuster (1998). Jon Meacham writes that, "With a single phrase, King joined Jefferson and Lincoln in the ranks of men who've shaped modern America".
The speech was ranked the top American speech of the 20th century in a 1999 poll of scholars of public address. The speech was described by journalist Sean O'Grady in The Independent as having "a strong claim to be the greatest in the English language of all time".
Background The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was partly intended to demonstrate mass support for the civil rights legislation proposed by U.S. president John F. Kennedy in June 1963. Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders, therefore, agreed to keep their speeches calm to avoid provoking the civil disobedience which had become the hallmark of the civil rights movement. King originally designed his speech as a homage to Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Gettysburg Address, timed to correspond with the centennial of Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.
Speech title and the writing process King had been preaching about dreams since 1960, when he gave a speech to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) called "The Negro and the American Dream". This speech discusses the gap between the American Dream and reality, saying that overt white supremacists have violated the dream, and that "our federal government has also scarred the dream through its apathy and hypocrisy, its betrayal of the cause of justice". King suggests that "It may well be that the Negro is God's instrument to save the soul of America."Martin Luther King Jr., "The Negro and the American Dream ", speech delivered to the NAACP in Charlotte, NC, September 25, 1960. In 1961, he spoke of the civil rights movement and student activists' "dream" of equality—"the American Dream ... a dream as yet unfulfilled"—in several national speeches and statements and took "the dream" as the centerpiece for these speeches.
On November 27, 1962, King gave a speech at Booker T. Washington High School in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. That speech was longer than the version which he would eventually deliver from the Lincoln Memorial. And while parts of the text had been moved around, large portions were identical, including the "I have a dream" refrain. After being rediscovered in 2015, the restored and digitized recording of the 1962 speech was presented to the public by the English department of North Carolina State University.
King had also delivered a speech with the "I have a dream" refrain in Detroit, in June 1963, before 25,000 people in Detroit's Cobo Hall immediately after the 125,000-strong Great Walk to Freedom on June 23, 1963. Reuther had given King an office at Solidarity House, the United Auto Workers headquarters in Detroit, where King worked on his "I Have a Dream" speech in anticipation of the March on Washington. Mahalia Jackson, who sang "How I Got Over" at the march just before King's speech, knew about the Detroit speech. After the March on Washington, a recording of King's Cobo Hall speech was released by Detroit's Gordy Records as an LP entitled The Great March To Freedom.
King's speech at the March on Washington was drafted with the assistance of Stanley Levison and Clarence Benjamin Jones in Riverdale, New York City. Jones has said that "the logistical preparations for the march were so burdensome that the speech was not a priority for us" and that, "on the evening of Tuesday, Aug. 27, (12 hours before the march) Martin still didn't know what he was going to say".
The speech has been shown to have had several versions, written at several different times. It has no single version draft, but is an amalgamation of several drafts, and was originally called "Normalcy, Never Again". Little of this, and another "Normalcy Speech", ended up in the final draft. A draft of "Normalcy, Never Again" is housed in the Morehouse College Martin Luther King Jr. Collection of the Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center and Morehouse College.Morehouse College Martin Luther King Jr. Collection, 2009 "Notable Items " Retrieved December 4, 2013 The focus on "I have a dream" comes through the speech's delivery. Toward the end of its delivery, King departed from his prepared remarks and started "preaching" improvisationally, punctuating his points with "I have a dream." In the church spirit, Mahalia Jackson lent her support from her seat behind him, shouting, "Tell 'em about the dream, Martin!" just before he began his most famous segment of the speech. Taylor Branch writes that King later said he grasped at the "first run of oratory" that came to him, not knowing if Jackson's words ever reached him.
Speech
The ideas in the speech reflect King's social experiences of ethnocentric abuse, mistreatment, and exploitation of Black people.Exploring Religion and Ethics: Religion and Ethics for Senior Secondary Students, p. 192, Trevor Jordan – 2012. The speech draws upon appeals to America's myths as a nation founded to provide freedom and justice to all people, and then reinforces and transcends those secular mythologies by placing them within a spiritual context by arguing that racial justice is also in accord with God's will. Thus, the rhetoric of the speech provides redemption to America for its racial sins.See David A. Bobbitt, The Rhetoric of Redemption: Kenneth Burke's Redemption Drama and Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" Speech, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. King describes the promises made by America as a "promissory note" on which America has defaulted. He says that "America has given the Negro people a bad check", but that "we've come to cash this check" by marching in Washington, D.C.
Widely hailed as a masterpiece of rhetoric, King's speech alludes to pivotal documents in American history, including the Emancipation Proclamation, the US Declaration of Independence, and the US Constitution. Early in the speech, he alludes to the Gettysburg Address by saying: "Five score years ago ...". In reference to the abolition of slavery articulated in the Emancipation Proclamation, King says: "It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity."
King's speech used words and ideas from his own speeches and other texts. For years, he had quoted from Samuel Francis Smith's popular patriotic hymn "America (My Country, 'Tis of Thee)", and referred extensively to the Bible. The idea of constitutional rights as an "unfulfilled promise" was suggested by Clarence Jones. The speech, in the cadences of a sermon, is infused with allusions to biblical verses, including ("I have a dream that every valley shall be exalted ...") and Amos 5:24 ("But let justice roll down like water ..."). +Notable quotations"I Have a Dream"The Declaration of Independence (1776)I have a dream that one day, this nation will rise up, and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.' I have a dream.We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator [God] with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.Five score years ago , a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves, who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice.Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (1863)Four score and seven years ago , our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Anaphora (the repetition of a phrase at the beginning of sentences) is employed throughout the speech. Early in his speech, King urges his audience to seize the moment; "Now is the time" is repeated three times in the sixth paragraph. The most widely cited example of anaphora is found in the often quoted phrase "I have a dream", which is repeated eight times as King paints a picture of an integrated and unified America for his audience. Other occasions include "One hundred years later", "We can never be satisfied", "With this faith", "Let freedom ring", and "free at last". King was the sixteenth out of eighteen people to speak that day, according to the official program. Among the most quoted lines of the speech are "I have a dream 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. I have a dream today!"Excel HSC Standard English, p. 108, Lloyd Cameron, Barry Spurr – 2009King alludes to the Ku Klux Klan when he calls to "let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia", near Atlanta; the mountain was a gathering spot for Klan members in the early 20th century. In the 1920s, the mountain's owners—members themselves—engraved upon it a memorial to leaders of the Confederacy: Confederate president Jefferson Davis, and Confederate Army generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.
The end of King's speech alludes to Galatians 3:28: "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus". He also alludes to the opening lines of Shakespeare's Richard III ("Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer ...") when he remarks that "this sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn ..."Alvarez, Alexandra (March 1988), "Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream': The Speech Event as Metaphor", Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 18, No. 3 (pp. 337–357), p. 242.
Rhetoric