I Have a Dream

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This article is about the Martin Luther King speech. For other uses, see I Have a Dream (disambiguation).

View from the Lincoln Memorial toward theWashington Monument on August 28, 1963 Martin Luther King, Jr. delivering "I Have a Dream" at the 1963 Washington D.C. Civil Rights March.

"I Have a Dream" is a 17-minute public speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered on August 28, 1963, in which he called for an end to racism in the United States. The speech, delivered to over 200,000 civil rights supporters from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, was a defining moment of the American Civil Rights Movement.
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King begins by invoking the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed millions of slaves in 1863, years later, the Negro still is not free."
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but says that "one hundred

At the end of the speech, King departed from his prepared text for a partly

improvised peroration on the theme of "I have a dream", possibly prompted by Mahalia Jackson's cry, "Tell them about the dream, Martin!" In this part of the speech, which most excited the crowd and has now become the most famous, King described dreams of freedom and equality arising from a land of slavery and hatred.
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"I have a dream" was ranked the top American speech of the 20th century by a 1999 poll of scholars of public address.

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The location on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial from which King delivered the speech is commemorated with this inscription The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was partly intended to demonstrate mass support for the civil rights legislation proposed by President Kennedy in June. King and other leaders therefore agreed to keep their speeches calm, and 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 Gettysburg Address, timed to correspond with the 100-year centennial of theEmancipation Proclamation. Speech title and the writing process King had been speaking about dreams since 1960, when he gave a speech to theNational 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 the American lived reality, saying that overt white supremacists have violated the dream, but also that "our federal government has also scarred the dream through its apathy and hypocricy, its betrayal of the cause of justice". King suggests that "It may well be that the Negro is Gods instrument to save the soul of America."
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He had also delivered a "dream"

speech in Detroit, in June 1963, when he marched on Woodward Avenue with Walter Reuther and the Reverend C. L. Franklin, and had rehearsed other parts.

The March on Washington Speech, known as "I Have a Dream Speech", has been shown to have had several versions, written at several different times.
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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," ends up in the final draft. A draft of "Normalcy, Never Again" is housed in the Morehouse College Martin Luther King, Jr. Collection of Robert W. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center and Morehouse College.
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Our focus on "I have a dream," comes through the speech's delivery. Toward the

end of its delivery, noted African American gospel singerMahalia Jackson shouted to Dr. King from the crowd, "Tell them about the dream, Martin." have a dream." The speech was drafted with the assistance of Stanley Levison and Clarence Benjamin Jones
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Dr. King stopped delivering his prepared speech and started "preaching", punctuating his points with "I

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".

Leading up to the speech's rendition at the Great March on Washington, King had delivered its "I have a dream" refrains in his speech before 25,000 people in Detroit's Cobo Hall immediately after the 125,000-strong Great Walk to Freedom in Detroit,

June 23, 1963.

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After the Washington, D.C. March, a recording of King's Cobo Hall speech was released by Detroit's Gordy
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records as an LP entitled "The Great March To Freedom."

Background The location on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial from which King delivered the speech is commemorated with this inscription The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was partly intended to demonstrate mass support for the civil rights legislation proposed by President Kennedy in June. King and other leaders therefore agreed to keep their speeches calm, and 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 Gettysburg Address, timed to correspond with the 100-year centennial of [5]\ theEmancipation Proclamation. I Have a Dream by Martin Luther King Jr. is one of the most memorable speeches of all time. It is worthy of lengthy study as we can all learn speechwriting skills from Kings historic masterpiece. Have a Dream Introduction Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech on August 28, 1963, at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Many regard it as the greatest speech of the twentieth century and, more than that, one of the greatest speeches in history. Though King was one of several featured speakers that day, "I Have a Dream" became synonymous with the aims of the march and the entire civil rights movement. His dream represented the dream of millions of Americans demanding a free, equal, and just nation. I Have a Dream Biography Martin Luther King Jr. Martin Luther King Jr. was born January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, to Martin Luther King Sr. and Alberta Williams King. His father was the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta and provided him with a middle-class upbringing that allowed for a more extensive education than was typically available to black children in the South. Though it was expected that King would follow in his father and maternal grandfather's footsteps and become a pastor, he was initially more interested in working for social change. Biography Martin Luther King, Jr., (January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968) was born Michael Luther King, Jr., but later had his name changed to Martin. His grandfather began the family's long tenure as pastors of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, serving from 1914 to 1931; his father has served from then until the present, and from 1960 until his death Martin Luther acted as co-pastor. Martin Luther attended segregated public schools in Georgia, graduating from high school at the age of fifteen; he received the B. A. degree in 1948 from Morehouse College, a distinguished Negro institution of Atlanta from which both his father and grandfather had graduated. After three years of theological study at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania where he was elected president of a predominantly white senior class, he was awarded the B.D. in 1951. With a fellowship won at Crozer, he enrolled in graduate studies at Boston University, completing his residence for the doctorate in 1953 and receiving the degree in 1955. In Boston he met and married Coretta Scott, a young woman of uncommon intellectual and artistic attainments. Two sons and two daughters were born into the family. In 1954, Martin Luther King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Always a strong worker for civil rights for members of his race, King was, by this time, a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading organization of its kind in the nation. He was ready, then, early in December, 1955, to accept the leadership of the first great Negro nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States, the bus boycott described by Gunnar Jahn in his presentation speech in honor of the laureate. The boycott lasted 382 days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses, Negroes and whites rode the buses as equals. During these days of boycott, King was arrested, his home was bombed, he was subjected to personal abuse, but at the same time he emerged as a Negro leader of

the first rank. In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization formed to provide new leadership for the now burgeoning civil rights movement. The ideals for this organization he took from Christianity; its operational techniques from Gandhi. In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action; and meanwhile he wrote five books as well as numerous articles. In these years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of conscience. and inspiring his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", a manifesto of the Negro revolution; he planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of Negroes as voters; he directed the peaceful march on Washington, D.C., of 250,000 people to whom he delivered his address, "l Have a Dream", he conferred with President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B. Johnson; he was arrested upwards of twenty times and assaulted at least four times; he was awarded five honorary degrees; was named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963; and became not only the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure. At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. When notified of his selection, he announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement. On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated.

I Have a Dream Themes Equality The purpose behind the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and King's speech was a demand for equality for all Americans, regardless of skin color. King speaks in front of the Lincoln Memorial one hundred years after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Though the Proclamation legally freed the slaves, King argues that "one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free" because of racism and discrimination. Segregation, Jim Crow laws, fear, and violence have kept black Americans from enjoying freedom and equality, and instead "the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land." America's persistence in this inequality based solely on race is keeping the country from truly being great, King insists. He encourages those fighting for equality and freedom to continue their fight in a peaceful manner, confident in the knowledge that this collective action...