Speech By: Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King
Date: August 28, 1963
Location: Lincoln Memorial
Occasion: March on Washington
For those who can remember the excitement this speech
wrought, it hardly seems fifty years. But measured across the changes it brought,
it might better be measured in light years.
In a sense, it turned our nation in the direction of
becoming the people we had always professed to be. But America was already
headed in the direction the March on Washington wanted it to go anyway.
For all of the very real horror and terror and dehumanizing
abuse African Americans had suffered, since signing of the Emancipation
Proclamation a century earlier, change was coming. And the speech itself made
that clear. The demand for equal rights was a process gaining steam. It was a demand
made – not only by those who were denied that equality, but by those who were
not denied but stood shoulder to shoulder with them – the crowd at the March on
Washington was biracial.
What this speech did was accelerate the process. How? Like
every great speech - by finding an audience beyond that of the people to whom
it was first delivered.
Using as a backdrop, the carved marble visage of the man
who had signed the Proclamation which began that achingly slow process, King
stood before a crowd estimated at 250,000. Few speakers ever get to address
such crowds.
After a brief introductory sentence, King begins with an
homage to the most famous speech of the man in whose stone shadow he stood –
“Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand
today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation.”
He then goes on, while giving credit to the founders and
the system of promise they created, but at the same time labels it a promise
unfulfilled. Slavery may have been abolished a century earlier, but segregation
is the new slavery: “One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still
sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of
discrimination.”
And, while he warns those who would perpetuate this
modern slavery that their time for being called to account is at hand, he
issues equal warning to those who would engage in excess in response: “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.”
That philosophy, along with the philosophy of
nonviolence, is key to the success of the man who preached them, and the
ultimate success of his movement.
About halfway through the speech, King issues his call to
action: “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.”
This is unusual – normally, the call to action is
one of the last elements of a speech, or even the final passage of it. There is
a reason. He is about to take a decent speech, and by ad-libbing, make it
historic.
“I have a dream” – is not in the text of the speech
originally distributed to reporters covering the event. King added it as he
stood there. And he employed that phrase in one of the classic oratorical
devices – repetition. He uses it eight times.
But the classic lines are these: “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.”
The speech would immediately become known by this bit of
improvisation.
Could he have dreamed that less than half a century later,
the Oval Office would be occupied by a man of his own race? Or that President
Obama would render this verdict on the movement that King led? “Because they marched, America became more
fair. America changed for you and me, and the entire world grew strength from
that example.”
We can only dream he did.
Length (words): 1652
