3
The Speech
“We really only trust conscious decision making,” writes Malcolm Gladwell in Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking. “But there are moments, particularly in times of stress, when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments . . . can offer a much better means of making sense of the world.”
Herein lies the apparent paradox of King’s delivery of the “I Have a Dream” speech. In a very real sense, King had been training for this moment his whole life. When it came, he literally set aside everything he’d prepared and went with his gut. At the time the church was to Black America what the École Normal Superieure is to France or Oxbridge is to Britain—the incubator and inculcator of a political elite. Under slavery and segregation it was one of the few places where African Americans could organize autonomously. Those who rose through its ranks were not dependent on white people for money and were among the most likely to be literate.
As one of the third generation of preachers in his family, King had always been a precocious member of the Black clergy’s aristocracy. As a kindergartener he could recite biblical passages from memory. As a small child he once told his mother: “You just wait and see. I’m going to get me some big words.” At fifteen he won a prize in a contest sponsored by the Black Elks, a Black fraternal organization, with a speech called “The Negro and the Constitution.” As a seminary student he took homiletics: the application of the general principles of rhetoric to preaching. “Martin was a Hegelian,” Jack O’Dell, who worked with King at the SCLC, told me. “He wasn’t just a preacher. He was a man of the Enlightenment.”
Schooled from such an early age to both lead and preach, King was part of a select corps to which Harlem Renaissance poet and intellectual James Weldon Johnson gave the name “God’s Trombones.” “The old-time Negro preacher of parts was above all an orator, and in good measure an actor,” Johnson writes. “He knew the secret of oratory, that at bottom it is a progression of rhythmic words more than it is anything else. . . . He was a master of all the modes of eloquence. . . . His imagination was bold and unfettered. He had the power to sweep his hearers before him and so himself was often swept away. At such times his language was not prose but poetry.”
Within a range of known and tested clerical structures that the preachers employed, a certain degree of improvisation was not only possible, it was expected. “They were the first of the slaves to learn to read,” Johnson explains. “And their reading was confined to the Bible, and specifically to the more dramatic passages of the Old Testament. A text served mainly as a starting point and often had no relation to the development of the sermon.”
§ § §
King labored extensively over the text of his speech for the march. He worked on it intermittently throughout the preceding four days, fitting the writing and rewriting within a frantic schedule. He also asked two of his aides, Clarence Jones and Stanley Levison, to work on a draft. He met with key advisers on the night preceding the march to discuss what he should say the next day, and then stayed up until the early hours going over it all again.
Yet for all that careful preparation, the part of the speech that went on to enter the history books was added extemporaneously while he was standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, speaking in full flight to the crowd. “I know that on the eve of his speech it was not in his mind to revisit the Dream,” wrote Clarence Jones.
Euchner is not so sure. In an interview he told me that a guest in the hotel room adjacent to King’s heard him rehearsing the “I have a dream” passage and that King may have not included it in the final text so as not to give away his signature finale prematurely. Moreover, he believes Mahalia Jackson’s intervention may have been exaggerated. He questions whether King heard her above the cacophony of voices in that moment and, even if he did, whether he could have responded in such a manner to such a specific request.
Though including the “dream” passage was a spontaneous decision, the theme itself wasn’t invented on the spot. In fact, King had been using it for well over a year. The singer and family friend Mahalia Jackson had heard him employ it at a demonstration in Detroit a few months earlier. Jackson had a particularly intimate emotional relationship with King, who would call her when he felt down for some “gospel musical therapy.” “She was his favorite gospel singer,” Jones told me. “And he would ask her to sing ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ or ‘Jesus Met the Woman at the Well’ down the phone.” Now, standing right next to him as he was winding up his prepared text, she shouted: “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin.” King never subsequently confirmed that he had heard her. But Jones says that he must have done so, because he himself had heard her and he was standing just fifteen feet away from King. Edward Kennedy, who was also standing nearby, said that he had heard her too.
King spoke some months later of the spontaneity of his decision to include the passage. “I started out reading the speech, and I read it down to a point,” he said. “The audience response was wonderful that day. . . . And all of a sudden this thing came to me that . . . I’d used many times before . . . ‘I have a dream.’ And I just felt that I wanted to use it here. . . . I used it, and at that point I just turned aside from the manuscript altogether. I didn’t come back to it.”
The inclusion of the passage may have been off the cuff, but the impulse behind it was deeply informed. “When King was a student at Crozer Theological Seminary he learned several stylized sermon structures in his homiletics courses,” writes Drew Hansen in The Dream, “such as the ‘Ladder Sermon,’ in which arguments are arranged in order of increasing persuasiveness, and the ‘Jewel Sermon,’ in which a single idea was examined from several different perspectives. . . . [There was also] the ‘Rabbit in the Bushes’ structure in which a preacher who feels the crowd respond should keep addressing the same idea, just as a hunter might shoot repeatedly into the bushes to see if a rabbit is there.”
Throughout 1963 King made almost a speech a day. His other commitments precluded his crafting a different address for each occasion. Instead he would weave together previously used riffs, anecdotes, and metaphors—both biblical and secular—to frame a particular argument or describe a specific situation.
“Martin could remember exact phrases from several of his unrelated speeches and discover a new way of linking them together as if they were all parts of a singular, ever-evolving speech,” says Jones. “He could speak extemporaneously at all times, and while he was speaking he could be mentally cutting and pasting things he had said from other speeches. He would be mentally inserting them. Just seamlessly. That’s what he did.”
The task was to repurpose the range of material already available in a way that avoided reducing what was said to the platitudes of a stump speech. This would have been particularly important in 1963, when the political situation was shifting so quickly that the words that moved crowds at the beginning of the year, before Birmingham, the summer of protest, and the march, might not work at all at its end, in the wake of the tragedies of the Sunday school bombing and Kennedy’s assassination.
Quite where and when King first acquired the phrase “I have a dream” is not known. Hansen traces it to a contribution at a prayer service in Sasser, Georgia, in 1962, after a church burning, or, possibly, a different service in Albany, Georgia. But Wyatt Tee Walker says he remembers King using it at least two years before the March on Washington. The first use documented by transcript is from a speech King gave on November 27, 1962, in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Much of it precisely prefigures the version used at the March on Washington—a dream “rooted deeply in the American dream” with “ little black boys and little black girls” and a meeting of “sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners . . . at the table of brotherhood.”
By the summer of the following year King was using the dream idiom frequently. At the Detroit rally in June, where Jackson heard it, he used it to refer to recent arson attacks: “I have a dream this afternoon, that one day, one day, men will no longer burn down houses and the church of God simply because people want to be free.” He name checked some of the most prominent victims of violence. “I have a dream this afternoon that there will be a day when we will no longer face the atrocities that Emmett Till had to face or Medgar Evers had to face, but that all men can live with dignity.” And he raised the issue of the exclusion of Black people from jobs and housing. “I have a dream this afternoon that one day, right here in Detroit, Negroes will be able to buy a house or rent a house anywhere that their money will carry them and they will be able to get a job.”
Just a week before the march, at a huge fundraiser in Chicago for the National Insurance Association, which represented Black-owned and -operated insurance companies, he would tailor it differently. “I have a dream that one day, right down in Birmingham, Alabama, where the home of my good friend Arthur Shores was bombed just last night, white men and Negro men, white women and Negro women, will be able to walk together as brothers and sisters. I have a dream.”
Clearly it was already being recognized as one of his more memorable refrains. When he finished speaking in Chicago the emcee thanked King, saying: “I don’t have that eloquence, so you’ll have to have another dream.” Hansen points out that it even stuck in the memory of one of Bull Connor’s deputies, who had been sent to inform on a meeting where King spoke in Birmingham that spring. “He said that he had a dream of seeing little Negro boys and girls walking to school with little white boys and girls,” the deputy reported, “playing in the parks together and going swimming together.”
“That speech was made up of a lot of elements of speeches that he had given that previous year,” explains Harding. “So when I heard it I couldn’t say that I was thinking the world would hold on to it the way that they did.”
King’ greatness as a speaker, said James Baldwin, lay “in his intimate knowledge of the people he is addressing, be they black or white, and in the forthrightness with which he speaks of those things which hurt or baffle them.”
King told his aides that the most important thing for him in any sermon was having some sense of where and how he would finish. “First I find my landing strip. It’s terrible to be circling around up there without a place to land.” The problem with the text that he had in hand for the day of the march was that it seemed a lot stronger on takeoff than on landing.
So the way King ended the speech (freestyling) was far more typical than the way he started it (tethered to a written text). But given the enormity of the moment, he could not simply rely on his ability to find the right words at the right time. King was an extraordinary natural orator, but even he was not so confident as to believe his best strategy on such an occasion lay in extemporizing and hoping the Spirit would find him. “This was a different audience, a different time, a different place,” says Lewis. “This was truly history, and Dr. King knew it. We all knew it. We’d known it with our own speeches and he knew it with his. He was responding to the occasion. He was speaking not just to the massive audience before us, but to the president, to Congress, to the nation, to the world.”
So he worked and reworked the speech, worrying away at it, determined to get it exactly right. He wanted it to be remembered like Gettysburg. He didn’t want to leave anything to chance. Unfortunately for him, the politics and personalities that had so overshadowed the organization of the march complicated these aspirations. Some, through personal jealousy or political rivalry, had not wanted to concede the final speaker slot to him. They recognized that this would effectively make him the keynote speaker of the entire event. So petty were their rivalries that some in King’s camp believed the only reason others agreed to his going last was because they thought that by the time he spoke, the networks would have ceased covering the march and returned to regular programming. If true, this turned out to be a major miscalculation: immediately prior to King’s arrival at the podium, both ABC and NBC announced that they were interrupting their regular programming to broadcast his speech.
Only when it was pointed out that if King didn’t speak last then someone would have to follow him was the matter dropped. Everyone knew he was the best speaker, and nobody wanted to take the mic in his wake. “You are wise because, the minute King has finished,” Rustin told them, “. . . everybody is going to head home.”
Then came the matter of timing. Rustin had allotted every speaker five minutes, with a strict warning not to exceed seven minutes. Having given King the plum slot, some were now concerned that he would dominate the proceedings by taking longer than anyone else. Wilkins threatened to cut the microphone off if King went over ten minutes. These “God’s Trombones” of Johnson’s were soloists by temperament, and once they got going they could be difficult to stop. Other speakers insisted that King have the same limited amount of time as everyone else.
Jones felt this was an insult to King. “With all due respect to Roy Wilkins, James Farmer, John Lewis, Walter Reuther, Rabbi so-and-so, Reverend so-and-so—with all due respect to them, these people who came, they didn’t come for them,” Jones told King. “They came for you.”
King was upset by the determination of his allies to limit his time. “They are trying to throttle me,” he said. “Maybe they’re determined that I not be in a position of making a speech that will get a great response from the people.”
Jones backed him up. “I don’t care if they speak for five minutes—that’s fine. You are going to take as much time as you need,” he told him. Randolph reassured Jones that King could have as much time as he needed, with the proviso that Jones not tell the others anything about the concession. By this time, however, King had resolved that if it was what the others wanted, he would adhere to the time limit.
This would not be easy. After all, he had a lot of material to fit into the speech. “First, he had a reservoir of concepts and scriptural material from speeches he’d given elsewhere,” explains Jones.
In addition, earlier that summer before the deadline pressures were so intense, he had asked [others] for some thoughts on the tone and content of his speech. Then he and I had discussed the topics in more detail during the three weeks the King family spent at my home in Riverdale. After that, even more specifically, Martin had asked Stanley [Levison] and me to prepare a draft of the point of departure, the direction, and the substance of some of the things we thought Martin should say.
It was in no way a final polished speech, but we had outlined some solid ideas. We believed the occasion was a national extended mass meeting of our supporters. [Given this], we felt Martin had an obligation to provide leadership, offering a vision that we were involved in action, not activity; a clear-eyed assessment of the challenges we faced; and a road map of how we could best meet those challenges. Ours was a speech built around new initiatives, and Martin had expressed enthusiasm when we’d presented it to him earlier in the month.
Those who knew him well, including Jones, are keen to emphasize that King’s speeches were very much his own. He would invite contributions from a range of collaborators. But the end product was always up to him and him alone. Only this time, given the importance of the occasion, he sought more input than usual. Several early versions were effectively drafted by committee. On the Saturday before the march King met with advisers at Jones’s New York home. Everyone had their pet issue. Rustin wanted something about labor in it; some wanted him to use “I have a dream.” Walter Fauntroy liked the “bad check” metaphor. On Monday, in Atlanta, King worked on the speech with Ed Clayton before calling him back later that night with his edits. He revised it again on the plane while flying to Washington.
On arrival in Washington, King’s advisers convened in the lobby of the Willard Hotel to talk through for a final time what he was going to say. Once again, a variety of positions were advanced. “It seemed everyone had a stake in this speech, a predetermined angle,” writes Jones. Ralph Abernathy said: “Martin, you have to preach. Most of the folks coming tomorrow are coming to hear you preach.” Others wanted him to appeal more explicitly to the younger activists.
By now, it seems, King was feeling overwhelmed by the challenge of reconciling the wide range of inputs. “Martin looked over at me and said, ‘Clarence, would you mind taking some notes?’” Jones later reported. “He suggested that when we were finished, I could organize them into something cohesive. . . . For the next few hours, I tried my best to keep track of all the information being offered up, discussed, and debated.”
Around 10 o’clock King proposed that Jones take a break and return with a summary of the main points. “And yes, try to do this without too many martinis,” he added wryly. Jones came back shortly after with what he thought was a faithful rendition of the discussion he had heard. He read it back to the group, and the heated debate started all over again. This was a cue for King to wrap the conversation up. “OK, brothers,” he said. “Thank you so very much for your suggestions and input. I am now going upstairs to my room to counsel with my Lord.”
King went to his suite and continued the redrafting. A few floors below, Walker made himself available. When King got stuck he’d call Walker, who would head upstairs as soon as he crafted something he thought would work. “When it came to my speech drafts,” writes Jones, “[King] often acted like an interior designer. I would deliver four strong walls, and he would use his God-given abilities to furnish the place so it felt like home.” King finished the outline around midnight and then wrote a draft in longhand.
“He was a craftsman and he spoke as a poet,” recalls Andrew Young. “He used to tell me, ‘You have good ideas but you don’t use enough adjectives. You’ve got to write a little more poetically.’ If you look at the copies of the speeches he wrote, he would scratch out a word five or six times, not just to get the right word but the right rhythm.” This one was no exception.
After struggling with the time constraints, King decided that using both “I have a dream” and the “bad check” would make the speech too long. He discarded the former. He finished writing at 4:00 a.m. and gave the final draft to his aides to be printed and distributed to the other speakers and the press. Thanks to the extensive negotiations about what should go in to it, the final version was, unsurprisingly, both familiar and unremarkable. “The prepared speech King brought with him to the podium stayed close to standard themes from the political rhetoric of the 1960s and the oratory of the civil rights movement,” writes Hansen: “the appeal to American ideals, the protest against gradualism, the call for nonviolence and racial integration within the freedom movement.”
The next morning was predictably hectic. Meetings with members of Congress made the leaders late for the march, and as noted, fraught negotiations about Lewis’s speech were ongoing. But in between all the other distractions King still found time to fiddle with what he’d supposedly finished the night before. When he eventually walked to the podium, the typed final version was full of cross-outs and scribbles.
“In a very real sense, the speech is truly meant to be heard,” writes Jones. “And though Martin Luther King Jr. was an astoundingly talented writer, in some ways it would do him a disservice to offer the transcript of the words without the accompanying propulsive force of the voice and mind behind it. It was a performance and has always been judged as such.”
§ § §
The day and the excitement had cooled a little by the time Mahalia Jackson, the “Queen of Gospel,” took to the mic to sing “I’ve Been ’Buked and I’ve Been Scorned,” which had been personally requested by King. When Rabbi Joachim Prinz finished his speech, the program was running half an hour behind schedule. King was sixteenth on an official program that included the national anthem, an invocation, a prayer, a tribute to women, two sets of songs, and nine other speakers. Only the benediction and the Pledge of Allegiance were to follow him. Weary from a night’s travel to get there, many were anxious to make good time on the journey back and had already left. Portions of the crowd had moved off to seek respite from the heat under the trees on the Mall, while others dipped their feet in the reflecting pool. Those most eager for a view of the podium braved the sun under the shade of their umbrellas.
The area around the mic was crowded with speakers, dignitaries, and their entourages. Rustin, rarely without a cigarette hanging from his lips, shuttled back and forth making sure everything was running to plan. Wearing a black suit, black tie, and white shirt, King edged through the melee toward the podium. On his left a park ranger adjusted the microphones so they were lower. Randolph, who had just finished introducing him, was over six feet tall; King was not much more than five-six.
I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.
The applause is polite. “Not everyone could hear King’s words,” writes Euchner in Nobody Turn Me Around. “The sound system, the best available, still crackled and blanked out. Far from the Lincoln Memorial people followed the words on transistor radios—and by watching the movement of bodies ahead.” Those close enough hear his voice as a deep baritone—a blend of southern timbre and ecclesiastical training that was once the prevailing accent of Black politics. After the march Newsweek described King’s voice as a church organ. But that misses one of its principal, distinctive attributes: a tremulous, quavering quality that finds its target and then hovers above it. “God’s Trombones,” wrote Johnson, “often possessed a voice that was a marvelous instrument, a voice [they] could modulate from a sepulchral whisper to a crashing thunder clap.”
Fivescore years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
It is intriguing how in times of political polarization and crisis, in 1963 as now, Americans draw their inspiration for unity from the very president who had to wage a war in order to impose it. King starts by locating the demands of Black America as consistent with America’s historical tradition rather than aberrant from it.
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. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.
He begins slowly, very slowly. Powerful pauses, deliberate diction, and flat, precise enunciation are hallmarks of this passage of the speech. Audiobooks run at between 150 and 160 words a minute. A slideshow presentation is usually roughly 100 words a minute. In his first minute King utters 77 words. Any concerns about time constraints he might have had previously have clearly been eclipsed by his desire to make sure that whatever he says is both heard and absorbed. By the time he’s done, he’ll have taken more than twice the time allotted to others.
But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free.
So begins the first of King’s many anaphoras: the rhetorical device whereby a speaker emphasizes his point by repeating a phrase at the beginning of neighboring clauses. Each time he returns to the phrase “One hundred years later,” he says it just a little quicker, and by the fourth time considerably louder so that its effect is more rousing. Episodically shaking his head in a combination of disbelief and despair, with each repetition he has the chance to look up from his text and, with each return to “One hundred years later,” pivot on his heels to face the crowd.
One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.
This is an honest and measured assessment of both the potential and limitations of what the march can achieve. It gives the movement agency: the chance to present itself, its leaders, and its agenda to the world on its own terms and articulate its demands in its own words.
In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
This metaphor came straight from Jones, with a story that starts in the jail cells of Alabama and ends in a New York bank vault with one of the nation’s wealthiest Republicans. Following the mass arrests in Birmingham, the movement needed to find a large amount of money quickly in order to pay bail for the large numbers of young people who had been arrested. Jones, at a loss, called Harry Belafonte for moral support. Belafonte thought he might have a solution. “I think I can stir the pot,” he said. “Let me do a little legwork. I’ll get back to you.”
Belafonte called Hugh Morrow, the speechwriter for New York Republican governor and future US vice president Nelson Rockefeller. Rockefeller had for some time been a low-profile supporter of the civil rights movement. Morrow told Jones to come to the headquarters of Chase Manhattan Bank in New York on the following Saturday. Jones showed up to find a security guard, a banker, Morrow, and Rockefeller present. “Everyone would play his part,” he wrote: “Rockefeller as the somewhat detached philanthropist, Morrow as the careful mouthpiece, the banker as the one making sure all the ‘i’s’ were dotted and ‘t’s’ were crossed, the Brink’s agent with the gun making sure nothing went haywire. And me in the role of the hat-in-hand Negro, trying hard to appear as if this were not the strangest situation I had ever encountered.”
Jones watched as more money than he’d ever seen before was locked in a briefcase. The banker gave him a sheet of paper.
“Please sign this, Mr. Jones,” he said.
“It was filigreed and stamped with official-looking seals,” Jones recalled. “In bold letters along the top it read. demand promissory note. The banker saw the concern in my eyes. ‘Banking regulations, sir. It’s—required.’ If I signed it, I became responsible for paying the money back. One hundred thousand dollars.”
“I can’t personally promise this will be paid back,” Jones said.
“There are legal conditions that apply here,” the banker insisted. “We need a signature or we can’t release the funds.”
Jones looked to Rockefeller and explained that neither he nor the SCLC could vouch for this amount of money.
“Just sign for it, Mr. Jones,” said Rockefeller. “You don’t need to worry about it.”
Jones signed, took the money, and sent it to Birmingham, and the youngsters were released. When he was back in his Manhattan office on Tuesday, a messenger arrived and requested a signature for receipt of a letter he was carrying. Inside the envelope, stamped “Personal and Confidential,” from Chase Manhattan Bank, was the promissory note he’d signed three days earlier marked paid in red ink.
“I had seen the cash nearly bursting out of the vault of the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York,” Jones recalled in a later conversation. “I knew wealth was out there, and—Mr. Rockefeller notwithstanding—I saw that most wealthy people turned a blind eye to the hungry. The same could certainly be said of the US government and its relationship to racism, uniquely positioned as it is with lawmaking and enforcing abilities. The government was rich with the power to help us and utterly miserly in doing so. They turned out empty pockets to show us there was nothing they could do. Well, we would see about that.”
It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”
Those final two words, effectively the punch line, are greeted with huge cheers.
But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.
At this point, four minutes in and with the urging of the crowd, King starts to find his oratorical stride. From now on he will read less and speak more, redirecting his attention from the words on paper to the audience.
O’Dell, one of King’s lieutenants, who stepped aside after Kennedy urged King to purge him because of his earlier membership in the Communist Party, argues that this is one of the strongest parts of the speech. “Everybody understands what a bad check is. And with that in the speech there remains an insistence that the ruling class still has to pay back—that it’s not over. It’s an indictment of the country that’s not a dream anymore.”
Some years later, O’Dell told me, he was asked to be an adviser on Ely Landau’s documentary about King, in which the march features prominently, and was shocked to find that the “bad check” metaphor had been edited out. He raised its absence gently with Landau. “It’s an indispensable part of the speech,” he said. “I’m just wondering why it wasn’t included.” There was no satisfactory response. Several years later the film was screened again at a festival. O’Dell went to see it. The section still wasn’t included, prompting O’Dell to reflect: “I think it’s inconvenient for people to remember the speech with that section in it because it brings it up to date.”
We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now.
“The fierce urgency of now” is a phrase Barack Obama would adopt during his first campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. “I am running in this race because of what Dr. King called ‘the fierce urgency of now.’ Because I believe that there’s such a thing as being too late, and that hour is almost upon us,” he said, speaking at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Iowa in 2007, just a couple of months before his victory over Hillary Clinton in the caucuses there propelled him to front-runner. Given the relative timidity of his first term, when his administration rarely appeared to be acting with either ferocity or urgency, it’s a reference that did not last long into his tenure. “We need the Barack Obama who ran in 2008,” wrote the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein in 2011. “The one who believed in ‘the fierce urgency of now,’ rather than ‘After the election, we hope.’”
This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.
This is the second anaphora. It employs, with ever greater emphasis, the repetition “Now is the time.” The phrase captures a reality that was particularly pertinent in 1963, when much of the civil rights leadership had been slow to acknowledge the impatience of its base. It was the lesson King had tried to convey from the Birmingham jail and that Randolph had passed on to Kennedy when he told the president: “The Negroes are already in the streets; it is very likely impossible to get them off.” It is, in a sense, the lesson of every liberation campaign: a successful movement needs to recognize its most propitious moment to strike and seize it. “Sekunjalo Ke Nako,” “Now Is the Time” in both Xhosa and Sotho was the campaign song of the African National Congress during South Africa’s first democratic elections.
Each time King repeated “Now is the time,” the crowd cheered the phrase rather than the specific imperative that followed it.
It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. [Applause.]
And there will be neither rest nor tranquillity in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.
This passage, which includes words borrowed from the opening lines of Shakespeare’s Richard III, was less a threat than a promise. Any delay in addressing the legacy of slavery, in all its manifestations, would have devastating consequences and risked widespread unrest. It was a threat made all the more real by the possibility that Malcolm X, waiting in the wings, might enter the stage from the Left.
But even though Malcolm X supported neither integration nor nonviolence, he nonetheless recognized that if nonviolent mass actions like the March on Washington were not a success, it would set back the entire antiracist struggle. The night before the march, he had visited Ossie Davis in his room at the Statler Hotel and told him: “I want you to know that if you need help on anything, I am here to help. I will be discreet. I have told the proper people that I am available. If you need to find me, I’ll tell you where to reach me. If there’s violence and I can help, tell me. I’ll do anything.”
This, Davis explained later, was part of an unarticulated but broadly understood grand strategy in which Malcolm X and the civil rights leadership colluded.
Martin and the regular civil rights leaders were presenting to America our best face. Our nonviolent face. Our desire to be included in American society. And we wanted to show the world that we had no evil intentions against anybody. We just wanted to be included. But they also understood that America, in spite our reassurances, would be frightened and hesitant to open the doors to Black folks. So Malcolm, as the outsider, as the man they thought represented the possibilities of violence, was the counter that they could use. They would say to the powers that be, “Look, here’s Martin Luther King and all these guys. We are nonviolent. Now outside the door, if you don’t deal with us, is the other brother, and he ain’t like us. You going to really have hell on your hands when you get to dealing with Malcolm. So it behooves you, white America, in order to escape Malcolm, to deal with us.”
To a certain extent this worked. The next year during debates over the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Wisconsin senator William Proxmire said:
The leader of the Negro movement in our country is not Malcolm X, the leader of the Black Muslims. The leader of the Negro movement in this country is Martin Luther King. What does Martin Luther King call for? What has he asked his people to do? He has called for them to love the people who oppose them. He has asked them to love, to cooperate, and to agree to work with them. . . . What was that dream? The dream was not one of revenge. The dream was not anything of that kind. The dream was of harmony—of a little white boy and a little black boy playing together, working together, and building together a better America.
But the decades to come would see neither rest nor tranquillity. After King’s implicit promise came an explicit disclaimer about a future he feared:
But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.
A convert to Gandhian philosophy, King believed that nonviolent resistance was not only the most effective form of struggle but morally right as well. He was not raised a pacifist, however, but became one. Rustin argues that when King first became famous, as a result of the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott, he did not fully understanding the full meaning of nonviolence. “I think it’s fair to say that Dr. King’s view of nonviolent tactics was almost nonexistent when the boycott began,” recalls Rustin. “In other words, at that point Dr. King was permitting himself and his children and his home to be protected by guns.”
And if King’s commitment to nonviolence had since deepened, we have seen how many on the march, especially after such a tempestuous summer, were still fragile converts. Birmingham was not the only place where an impatient and intemperate base had tested the credibility of the leadership.
The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. [applause]
And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.
With Black nationalism’s appeal still strong and the rise of the Black Power movement imminent, King’s demand for building a coalition of those who thought alike as opposed to those who looked alike was mistakenly seen as an example of his moderation.
There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: “For Whites Only.”
The trajectory of the speech can be understood by the progression of the anaphora deployed to this point: from “One hundred years later . . .” to “Now is the time . . .” and now “We can never be satisfied as long as . . .” Each one builds successively from past to present to future, making the argument that the legacy of slavery remains, the time to eradicate it is now, and the movement will not be stopped until the task is accomplished.
The issue of what would satisfy King was a matter of constant frustration for the Kennedy administration. In an oral history some years later, Burke Marshall remembered King as an inscrutable negotiating partner in Birmingham. “I talked to King and I asked him what he was after. He really didn’t know. It was hard to negotiate with King because he had no specifics. What he wanted was something.” In reality King’s demand was quite clear: an end to segregation in the city. But at that time and in that place such a demand was difficult for Marshall to comprehend as credible. What King ultimately wanted was something few could imagine, and remains so today: a Birmingham free of discrimination with equal rights and opportunity for all. His demands included the end of police brutality, racial profiling, endemic poverty, and the psychic inferiority all of this brought about. The totality of these demands, at once utopian and reasonable, idealistic and just, gave the lie to the notion that King was in any way a moderate.
We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.
Here King echoes John Lewis’s despair at a political culture in a moment of transition, with Democrats still the party of southern segregation and Republicans now pursuing disaffected whites in the South and the suburbs. Earlier in the day Lewis had asked: “But what political leader can stand up and say, ‘My party is the party of principles’?”
No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until “justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
While there have been several biblical allusions in the speech up to this point, this is the first reference taken directly from the Good Book. The quote is from Amos. One of the shepherds of Tekoa relates a vision he saw concerning Israel two years before an earthquake. Full of the wrath of the Old Testament, the Lord pledges, among other things, to punish the Israelites by sending “fire on the walls of Gaza that will consume her fortresses” and turning his “hand against Ekron till the last of the Philistines are dead.” Rather than listen to the music of their harps, he vows to “let justice roll on like a river and righteousness like a never-failing stream.” While one should not interpret these passages literally, one should not dismiss King’s use of them as mere window dressing either. King knew the Bible well and was not careless with words. There is no shortage of more conciliatory passages he might have used. Instead he cites the cost of the United States’ not satisfying demands for equality as nothing less than God’s vengeance.
Now comes King’s main point of departure from the prepared text. The next section, clearly intended to wind up the speech, was supposed to be as follows:
And so today, let us go back to our communities as members of the international association for the advancement of creative dissatisfaction. Let us go back and work with all the strength we can muster to get strong civil rights legislation in this session of Congress. Let us go down from this place to ascend other peaks of purpose. Let us descend from this mountaintop to climb other hills of hope.
King skipped this passage, for reasons about which we can only speculate. It could have been because he felt the speech was dragging or, given the response to his previous line, that he thought this section would slow it down. Certainly, from a rhetorical viewpoint, it adds little apart from the cumbersome “international association for the advancement of creative dissatisfaction”—surely a club few would ever want to join. And politically it ties the utopian vision of a postracial world to the mundane and thoroughly undeserving civil rights bill Kennedy was about to introduce to Congress. King then picked up the prepared text again.
I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. And some of you have come from areas where your quest—quest for freedom—left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.
One of the signature achievements of the civil rights movement during this era had been to transform jail time in the service of the movement from a stigma to an honor. This gave the lie to Malcolm X’s taunt that the demonstration was “nothing but a church picnic.” Given the thousands of people who had been arrested all over the country, it could just as easily have been called a mass gathering of former political prisoners. Indeed the scenes of comity on the Mall that day stood in vivid contrast to the vicious realities of daily life, let alone protest, elsewhere in the country.
The speech was supposed to end like this:
With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. Let us work and march and love and stand tall together until that day has come when we can join hands and sing, “Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”
Far worse speeches have earned their place in history. It had been delivered peerlessly, touched all the major bases, and contained some marvelous imagery. For all that, had this been the full speech, it would have done little more than summarize the same issues the other speakers had covered that day, albeit more poetically.
“As he delivered his prepared text that afternoon, I thought it was a good speech, but it was not nearly as powerful as many I had heard him make,” wrote Lewis. “As he moved toward his final words, it seemed that he, too, could sense that he was falling short. He hadn’t locked into that power that he so often found.”
It was now that Mahalia Jackson shouted, “Tell them about the dream, Martin,” arguably prompting King to continue improvising and start looking for “a place to land.”
Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.
Jones thought: “He’s off; he’s on his own now. He’s inspired.”
Jackson gave it another shot: “Tell them about the dream, Martin,” she shouted again.
Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.
The way King tells it, there was nobody else. Just him, the crowd, and the words: a preacher and the faithful. King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, recalled, “At that moment it seemed as if the Kingdom of God appeared. But it only lasted for a moment.”
And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.
It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
“No African came in freedom to the shores of the New World,” wrote nineteenth-century French intellectual Alexis de Tocqueville in his landmark book Democracy in America. “The Negro transmits to his descendants at birth the external mark of his ignominy. The law can abolish servitude, but only God can obliterate its traces.” But that didn’t stop them from trying. From the staging at Lincoln’s feet to King’s evocation of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, the address had been underpinned by a desire for the Black experience to be written back into American history and embedded in its polity. Now, King wanted to carve out a place in American mythology.
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.”
This was greeted with cheers. With the abandonment of the text comes the removal of the final barrier between King and the crowd, allowing him to dramatize his delivery still more effectively. From now on, at various moments, he will raise his arms, lock eyes with his crowd, look skyward, or shake his head. Having found comfort in the familiarity of the refrain, he looks more relaxed. It’s not so much that he’s found his voice—he’d never lost it—but rather that he’s found the voice to match the occasion.
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
As King reached his crescendo, writes Euchner, Ruth bat Mordecai sat on the Mall with children she had brought from a American Jewish Congress group in New York, her enjoyment marred by some Black boys horsing around. “Suddenly,” she said later, “we understand. The black boys are laughing not in mockery but in joy—at the utter preposterousness of what Dr King promises, and at its unutterable beauty.” At that time, indeed even today, the notion of Mississippi’s being an “oasis of freedom and justice” was indeed preposterous.
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.
This is the most willfully misinterpreted line in the entire speech, cavalierly abstracted by conservatives in particular to suggest that since race should not matter, racism and its legacy should not be taken into account.
I have a dream today!
At this point the audience is hooked. He has them. He raises his right arm.
I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of “interposition” and “nullification”—one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.
In The Dream, Drew Hansen points out that these were “references to the segregationist belief [which gained traction following the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision banning segregation nine years previously] that states could refuse to obey federal orders with which they disagreed, thus ‘interposing’ the state governments in opposition to the federal government and ‘nullifying’ objectionable federal interference.”
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; “and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”
This passage is another direct biblical quote, this time from the book of Isaiah 40:4, in which a “way for the Lord” is prepared in the wilderness. The twin themes of Isaiah are judgment and salvation. With messianic zeal, the book presages the destruction that will befall Judah and Jerusalem if their inhabitants do not repent of their sins and describes the salvation that awaits them if they do.
This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with.
It’s over. The passage for which the speech will be remembered, and which was almost not uttered, lasted just 301 words, less than a fifth of the total word count, and for two minutes and forty seconds, just over a sixth of the total time. The landing strip is now in clear view.
With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.
Here King returns to the written text for what would have been the finale. But he then departs from it again, reaching back into his repertoire for another familiar refrain, from “My Country ’Tis of Thee”:
With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.
This will be the day—this will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning:
My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.
Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrims’ pride,
From every mountainside, let freedom ring!
And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.
He starts with the one of the whitest states in the Union before moving on to give a panoramic vista of states going geographically from East to West and politically remaining in the North.
And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.
Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.
Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.
Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.
Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.
“Rustin,” recalls Horowitz, “always said that King’s genius was that he could simultaneously talk to a black audience about why they needed to achieve their freedom and address a white audience about why they should support that freedom. Simultaneously. It was a genius that he could do that as one Gestalt.”
So now he brings the speech to a final close by drawing in the South, that part of the country struggling to find its place in the late twentieth century.
But not only that:
Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.
Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.
From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
The mention of each southern state receives its own cheer. King raises his right arm for several seconds and then lifts both arms so his hands, which have formed clenched fists, are level with his head.
And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:
With each “Free at last!” he raises his right arm just a little higher until it is fully extended over his head. He begins to wave farewell, even before he has finished speaking.
Free at last! Free at last!
Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!
§ § §
“Though he was extremely well known before he stepped up to the lectern,” wrote Jones of King, “he stepped down on the other side of history.”
“Many white Americans had never heard a full speech delivered by any Black person,” Julian Bond told me, before joking: “We are lucky this was the first. Many probably came away thinking we were a race of incredibly gifted orators! Who knew?”
Watching the whole thing on TV in the White House, Kennedy, who’d never heard an entire King speech before, remarked: “He’s damned good. Damned good.” When King and some of the other speakers went to the White House immediately afterward, Kennedy greeted him with a smile and said: “I have a dream.”
The speech left James Farmer crying in his Louisiana jail cell. “The conscience of the nation could not be wrung any tighter,” he wrote. “I believed then, and still do, that [it] was an authentic American classic, on a par historically with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. There are times when divine inspiration so touches a person that he rises beyond himself. In that moment, at the March on Washington, Martin Luther King was touched by a spirit that cannot be recaptured in our lifetime.”
Though perhaps not quite so fulsome, most other responses to the speech praised King’s achievement in giving voice to the moment. “I was not disturbed at all by its message of hope and harmony,” recalled Lewis. “I have always believed there is room for both outrage and anger and optimism and love. Many, many times in my life, in many situations and circumstances, I have felt all these emotions at once. . . . Dr. King’s speech, despite its lack of substance, was magical and majestic in spirit. I felt immensely inspired and moved by his affirmation of brotherhood and community. It is the spirit of his words that has stood the test of time, even in the face of the darkness and pain and division that persist in America to this day. More than anyone else that summer afternoon in 1963, he captured the spirit of hope and possibility that so many of us wanted to feel.”
Almost everyone, including even King’s enemies, recognized the speech’s reach and resonance. William Sullivan, the FBI’s assistant director for domestic intelligence, recommended, “We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future of this nation.”
The speech did a great deal for King’s reputation all around. As Jones suggested, it made him a national and international celebrity “As a result of Dr. King’s speech,” said Mary King, a SNCC staffer, “he rose on the scene and became regarded as the major personality of the civil rights movement, and many then came to view him as Randolph had described him—the moral leader of the nation.”
But if, in its immediate aftermath, the speech had any significant political impact, it was not obvious. “At the time of King’s death in April 1968, his speech at the March on Washington had nearly vanished from public view,” writes Hansen. “There was no reason to believe that King’s speech would one day come to be seen as a defining moment for his career and for the civil rights movement as a whole. . . . King’s speech at the march is almost never mentioned during the monumental debates over the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which occupy around 64,000 pages of the Congressional Record.”
This was not a question of benign neglect. King’s speech wasn’t overlooked because it wasn’t good. It was marginalized because in the last few years of his life King himself was marginalized, and few who had the power to elevate his speech to iconic status had any self-interest in doing so. His growing propensity to take on an issue like poverty, followed by his opposition to the Vietnam War, lost him the support of the political class and much of his white and more conservative base. On April 4, 1967, at the Riverside Church in New York, he delivered a speech titled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.”
“If we continue there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam,” he said. “If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left with no alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to play.”
Most who know his speeches well count the Riverside Church one as his finest. O’Dell suggests that it was his growing maturity and an ever-keener sense of his mortality that sharpened his rhetoric as he got older. “He had the Nobel Prize and he didn’t know how long he was going to live,” he explains. “He wasn’t but thirty-nine, but he wasn’t going to live much longer, and that meant he didn’t have but maybe a few more speeches to give. So he had to say what he was going to say.”
The nation was even less ready to hear what King had to say about America’s militarism and warmongering than it was about his views on race. Andrew Young described the atmosphere following the Riverside speech: “Nationally, the reaction was like a torrent of hate and venom. This man who had been respected worldwide as a Nobel Prize winner, and as the only person in America who was advocating change without violence, suddenly applied his nonviolence ethic and practice to the realm of foreign policy. And no, [people said], it’s all right for Black people to be nonviolent when they’re dealing with white people, but white people don’t need to be nonviolent when they’re dealing with brown people. Since he was a Nobel Prize winner we expected people not to agree with it, but to disagree with certain specifics and at least to discuss it as an intelligent position that deserved at least an intelligent answer. We didn’t get that. We got instead an emotional outburst attacking his right to have an opinion.”
And while officialdom was keen to marginalize the messenger, Hansen chronicles how many African Americans soured to elements of the message as impatience with the enduring legacy of segregation and slavery grew and King’s leverage diminished. With time the utopian element of King’s speech, so crucial to its success in 1963, came to be misunderstood as naiveté. At a 1967 meeting addressed by then SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael, a seventeen-year-old woman in the audience said: “We intend to be the generation that says, Friends, we do not have a dream, we do not have a dream, we have a plan. So TV men, do not be prepared to record our actions indoors but be prepared to record our actions on the streets.” Particularly ironic given that King’s speech was made at a street action!
Following the riots in Watts that year, one resident said: “King, and all his talk about nonviolence, didn’t mean much. Watts had respect for King, but the talk about nonviolence made us laugh. . . . I have a dream . . . craa-ap. We don’t want dreams. We want jobs.”
Before the speech public opinion about King was evenly divided. Just a month after he wrote his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Gallup found 37 percent of Americans had an unfavorable view of him, compared to 41 percent who were favorable. A year later, after the speech and after President Lyndon Johnson had signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, his standing had improved slightly, 44 percent favorable, 38 percent unfavorable. In 1965, after he’d won the Nobel Peace Prize and shortly before the passage of the Voting Rights Act, his popularity dipped, with 45 percent favorable and 46 percent unfavorable. And a year later, as he began to speak out against the Vietnam War, the nation turned against him, with 33 percent viewing him favorably and 63 percent unfavorably.
For the political class King had become toxic, and his most famous speech was contaminated by association. Among the Black underclass King was still revered, but his speech was regularly misconstrued as excessively hopeful. Only after his death would the speech be resurrected and made fit for national mythology. It is important to remember that King died in Memphis supporting Black garbage workers in a battle over pay and conditions that had turned violent, a struggle centered on race and class, and in which his guiding philosophy had once again been tested and his relevance openly questioned.
“Within a few weeks of King’s death the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech had regained all the public visibility it had lost since 1963,” writes Hansen. “Newspapers and magazines reprinted lengthy sections from the speech in commemorative articles about King’s career. Members of Congress—no longer skittish about publicly praising King—recalled how moved they had been when they heard King speak at the march.”
It came not just to mark King’s crowning moment but to define his entire political contribution.
The Washington Post, which did not quote the refrain the day after the march, ran an editorial in the wake of his death claiming: “The dream of which he spoke so eloquently at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 must seem tonight, to many of his sorrowing countrymen and embittered fellow citizens, farther than ever from fulfillment. But that shining vision and bright hope will yet prevail. It must be our resolve to go forward with a greater sense of urgency to make a reality of his dream.”
The day after the assassination President Johnson said: “No words of ours—and no words of mine—can fill the void of the eloquent voice that has been stilled. But this I do believe deeply: the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., has not died with him.” Within a few weeks, notes Hansen, “a short biography called I Have a Dream and an unauthorized book of King quotations (also called I Have a Dream) had appeared for sale. Life’s excerpts of Coretta Scott King’s book about her husband were titled ‘He Had a Dream.’”
The ability of America’s powerful to co-opt and rebrand resistance to past inequities as evidence of the nation’s essential and unique genius is as impressive as it is cynical. Such sleight-of-hand is often exercised at the same time that attempts to correct the inequalities that made such resistance necessary in the first place are ignored or marginalized. At the Republican National Convention in 2012, some of the greatest cheers were for tales of immigrants and minorities overcoming obstacles to make great personal advances, even as the party platform sought to put new obstacles in the way of upcoming minorities and immigrants.
On the day of the march itself, this process was already under way. Documentary filmmakers for the US Information Agency were hard at work on the Mall, depicting the peaceful protest as part of its Cold War propaganda. “Smile,” they told the demonstrators. “This is going to Africa.” Euchner quotes Michael Thelwell, a SNCC worker, as saying: “So it happened that Negro students from the South, some of whom still had unhealed bruises from the electric cattle prods which Southern police used to break up demonstrations, were recorded for the screens of the world portraying ‘American Democracy at Work.’”
It was the same with the speech. Sanctified after his death, King’s oration would eventually be celebrated by those who actively opposed his efforts while he lived. “Remembering King through the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech allowed the nation to tell itself a comforting but inaccurate story about King’s legacy,” writes Hansen: “King had called on America from the Lincoln Memorial to abolish Jim Crow, the nation had done so, and King had died victorious.”
“The essential characteristic of a nation is that all its individuals must have many things in common,” wrote the nineteenth-century French philosopher Ernest Renan, “and must have forgotten many things as well.” For King’s speech to be remembered in the way it has, America had to forget not just most of what was in it but also the life’s work of the man who gave it, and the moment and movement that made it possible.