I Have A Dream

Forty-three years ago today Dr. Martin Luther King made his “I have a dream” speech to over 200,000 people.

Read and listen to it here. And contemplate the changes in society since then - and the fact that we still have a ways to go.

The most memorable part of the speech was apparently ad-libbed.

When he came to the point of bringing his short speech to a close, of sending the marchers back to their homes, he wavered. He seemed to sense that his balanced text had not done the job.

Mahalia Jackson, whose gospel singing had brought the audience to tears moments earlier, urged from the podium, “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin.” Whether he heard her or not, he started on an oratorical flourish that he had delivered many times before. He had spoken almost the same words at a June rally in Detroit. “I still have a dream,” he boomed in his honeyed baritone. “It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.”

He was no longer speaking, he was preaching. Inspired, eloquent, and utterly sincere, the minister from Atlanta was practically singing as he told of his dream that his own 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.”

Like a jazz musician, he improvised his way through the last 6 minutes of the 16-minute speech. He recited lines from the patriotic anthem that ends “let freedom ring.” He spoke of freedom ringing from every mountainside, even from “every hill and molehill of Mississippi.” He ended as he had ended many other speeches, with “the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’”

The world was watching that day. The television networks had preempted their soap operas. President Kennedy, a seasoned orator himself, was impressed by King’s style as he viewed the rally from the White House. King’s words and impassioned delivery stirred the nation. And he would never have such a forum again.

Some interesting background here:

As the 1960s wore on, King came to view social problems more through the lens of class and less through the lens of race. In his 1967 book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, he wrote, “In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out: there are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike.” Yet he was never so naive or ahistorical as to divorce race and class entirely, and in designing solutions to the inequities that plagued American society, he consciously singled out all African-Americans (and some whites too) as especially deserving of compensatory justice.