martin luther king i have a dream speech

#Martin luther king i have a dream speech how to

At the same time, the sonorous cadences and ringing, metaphor-rich language of the King James Bible came instinctively to him.

#Martin luther king i have a dream speech how to

King was comfortable with the black church’s oral tradition, and he knew how to read his audience and react to it he would often work jazzlike improvisations around favorite sermonic riffs - like the “dream” sequence - cutting and pasting his own words and those of others. The son, grandson and great-grandson of Baptist ministers, Dr. You could feel “the passion of the people flowing up to him,” James Baldwin, a skeptic of that day’s March on Washington, later wrote, and in that moment, “it almost seemed that we stood on a height, and could see our inheritance perhaps we could make the kingdom real.” Jones, “every version of the encouragements you would hear in a Baptist church multiplied by tens of thousands.” King, preach,” offering, in the words of his adviser Clarence B. There was reverent silence when he began speaking, and when he started to talk about his dream, they called out, “Amen,” and, “Preach, Dr. But if people were tired after a long day, they were absolutely electrified by Dr. Many wore hats and their Sunday best - “People then,” the civil rights leader John Lewis would recall, “when they went out for a protest, they dressed up” - and the Red Cross was passing out ice cubes to help alleviate the sweltering August heat. Many in the crowd that afternoon, 50 years ago on Wednesday, had taken buses and trains from around the country. King pushed the text of his remarks to the side and began an extraordinary improvisation on the dream theme that would become one of the most recognizable refrains in the world.

King was about halfway through his prepared speech when Mahalia Jackson - who earlier that day had delivered a stirring rendition of the spiritual “I Been ’Buked and I Been Scorned” - shouted out to him from the speakers’ stand: “Tell ’em about the ‘Dream,’ Martin, tell ’em about the ‘Dream’!” She was referring to a riff he had delivered on earlier occasions, and Dr. Instead, he situated the civil rights movement within the broader landscape of history - time past, present and future - and within the timeless vistas of Scripture.ĭr. Unlike many of the day’s previous speakers, he did not talk about particular bills before Congress or the marchers’ demands. He began slowly, with magisterial gravity, talking about what it was to be black in America in 1963 and the “shameful condition” of race relations a hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation. finally stepped to the lectern, in front of the Lincoln Memorial, to address the crowd of 250,000 gathered on the National Mall. It was late in the day and hot, and after a long march and an afternoon of speeches about federal legislation, unemployment and racial and social justice, the Rev.