summarize martin luther king speech

A Summary and Analysis of Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘I Have a Dream’ is one of the greatest speeches in American history. Delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-68) in Washington D.C. in 1963, the speech is a powerful rallying cry for racial equality and for a fairer and equal world in which African Americans will be as free as white Americans.

If you’ve ever stayed up till the small hours working on a presentation you’re due to give the next day, tearing your hair out as you try to find the right words, you can take solace in the fact that as great an orator as Martin Luther King did the same with one of the most memorable speeches ever delivered.

He reportedly stayed up until 4am the night before he was due to give his ‘I Have a Dream’, writing it out in longhand. You can read the speech in full here .

‘I Have a Dream’: background

The occasion for King’s speech was the march on Washington , which saw some 210,000 African American men, women, and children gather at the Washington Monument in August 1963, before marching to the Lincoln Memorial.

They were marching for several reasons, including jobs (many of them were out of work), but the main reason was freedom: King and many other Civil Rights leaders sought to remove segregation of black and white Americans and to ensure black Americans were treated the same as white Americans.

1963 was the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation , in which then US President Abraham Lincoln (1809-65) had freed the African slaves in the United States in 1863. But a century on from the abolition of slavery, King points out, black Americans still are not free in many respects.

‘I Have a Dream’: summary

King begins his speech by reminding his audience that it’s a century, or ‘five score years’, since that ‘great American’ Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This ensured the freedom of the African slaves, but Black Americans are still not free, King points out, because of racial segregation and discrimination.

America is a wealthy country, and yet many Black Americans live in poverty. It is as if the Black American is an exile in his own land. King likens the gathering in Washington to cashing a cheque: in other words, claiming money that is due to be paid.

Next, King praises the ‘magnificent words’ of the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence . King compares these documents to a promissory note, because they contain the promise that all men, including Black men, will be guaranteed what the Declaration of Independence calls ‘inalienable rights’: namely, ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’.

King asserts that America in the 1960s has ‘defaulted’ on this promissory note: in other words, it has refused to pay up. King calls it a ‘sacred obligation’, but America as a nation is like someone who has written someone else a cheque that has bounced and the money owed remains to be paid. But it is not because the money isn’t there: America, being a land of opportunity, has enough ‘funds’ to ensure everyone is prosperous enough.

King urges America to rise out of the ‘valley’ of segregation to the ‘sunlit path of racial justice’. He uses the word ‘brotherhood’ to refer to all Americans, since all men and women are God’s children. He also repeatedly emphasises the urgency of the moment. This is not some brief moment of anger but a necessary new start for America. However, King cautions his audience not to give way to bitterness and hatred, but to fight for justice in the right manner, with dignity and discipline.

Physical violence and militancy are to be avoided. King recognises that many white Americans who are also poor and marginalised feel a kinship with the Civil Rights movement, so all Americans should join together in the cause. Police brutality against Black Americans must be eradicated, as must racial discrimination in hotels and restaurants. States which forbid Black Americans from voting must change their laws.

Martin Luther King then comes to the most famous part of his speech, in which he uses the phrase ‘I have a dream’ to begin successive sentences (a rhetorical device known as anaphora ). King outlines the form that his dream, or ambition or wish for a better America, takes.

His dream, he tells his audience, is ‘deeply rooted’ in the American Dream: that notion that anybody, regardless of their background, can become prosperous and successful in the United States. King once again reminds his listeners of the opening words of the Declaration of Independence: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’

In his dream of a better future, King sees the descendants of former Black slaves and the descendants of former slave owners united, sitting and eating together. He has a dream that one day his children will live in a country where they are judged not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.

Even in Mississippi and Alabama, states which are riven by racial injustice and hatred, people of all races will live together in harmony. King then broadens his dream out into ‘our hope’: a collective aspiration and endeavour. King then quotes the patriotic American song ‘ My Country, ’Tis of Thee ’, which describes America as a ‘sweet land of liberty’.

King uses anaphora again, repeating the phrase ‘let freedom ring’ several times in succession to suggest how jubilant America will be on the day that such freedoms are ensured. And when this happens, Americans will be able to join together and be closer to the day when they can sing a traditional African-American hymn : ‘Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last.’

‘I Have a Dream’: analysis

Although Martin Luther King’s speech has become known by the repeated four-word phrase ‘I Have a Dream’, which emphasises the personal nature of his vision, his speech is actually about a collective dream for a better and more equal America which is not only shared by many Black Americans but by anyone who identifies with their fight against racial injustice, segregation, and discrimination.

Nevertheless, in working from ‘I have a dream’ to a different four-word phrase, ‘this is our hope’. The shift is natural and yet it is a rhetorical masterstroke, since the vision of a better nation which King has set out as a very personal, sincere dream is thus telescoped into a universal and collective struggle for freedom.

What’s more, in moving from ‘dream’ to a different noun, ‘hope’, King suggests that what might be dismissed as an idealistic ambition is actually something that is both possible and achievable. No sooner has the dream gathered momentum than it becomes a more concrete ‘hope’.

In his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, King was doing more than alluding to Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation one hundred years earlier. The opening words to his speech, ‘Five score years ago’, allude to a specific speech Lincoln himself had made a century before: the Gettysburg Address .

In that speech, delivered at the Soldiers’ National Cemetery (now known as Gettysburg National Cemetery) in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in November 1863, Lincoln had urged his listeners to continue in the fight for freedom, envisioning the day when all Americans – including Black slaves – would be free. His speech famously begins with the words: ‘Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.’

‘Four score and seven years’ is eighty-seven years, which takes us back from 1863 to 1776, the year of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. So, Martin Luther King’s allusion to the words of Lincoln’s historic speech do two things: they call back to Lincoln’s speech but also, by extension, to the founding of the United States almost two centuries before. Although Lincoln and the American Civil War represented progress in the cause to make all Americans free regardless of their ethnicity, King makes it clear in ‘I Have a Dream’ that there is still some way to go.

In the last analysis, King’s speech is a rhetorically clever and emotionally powerful call to use non-violent protest to oppose racial injustice, segregation, and discrimination, but also to ensure that all Americans are lifted out of poverty and degradation.

But most of all, King emphasises the collective endeavour that is necessary to bring about the world he wants his children to live in: the togetherness, the linking of hands, which is essential to make the dream a reality.

Discover more from Interesting Literature

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Read Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'I Have a Dream' speech in its entirety

Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. addresses the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., where he gave his "I Have a Dream" speech on Aug. 28, 1963, as part of the March on Washington. AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. addresses the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., where he gave his "I Have a Dream" speech on Aug. 28, 1963, as part of the March on Washington.

Monday marks Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Below is a transcript of his celebrated "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered on Aug. 28, 1963, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. NPR's Talk of the Nation aired the speech in 2010 — listen to that broadcast at the audio link above.

Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders gather before a rally at the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28, 1963, in Washington. National Archives/Hulton Archive via Getty Images hide caption

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.: Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. 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.

But 100 years later, the Negro still is not free. 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 in exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check.

Code Switch

The power of martin luther king jr.'s anger.

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.

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.

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.

Martin Luther King is not your mascot

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.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. 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 quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.

Civil rights protesters march from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial for the March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963. Kurt Severin/Three Lions/Hulton Archive/Getty Images hide caption

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. 1963 is not an end, but a beginning. 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.

There will be neither rest nor tranquility 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.

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.

Throughline

Bayard rustin: the man behind the march on washington (2021).

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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

How The Voting Rights Act Came To Be And How It's Changed

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. Some of you have come from areas where your 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. 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.

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.

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. 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.

People clap and sing along to a freedom song between speeches at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. Express Newspapers via Getty Images hide caption

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.

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.

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 down 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. I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, 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.

Nikole Hannah-Jones on the power of collective memory

• LISTEN & FOLLOW
• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts
• Amazon Music

Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free feed.

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. 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. 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 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. 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 snowcapped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California. 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.

And when this happens, and when we allow freedom 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: Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last.

Correction Jan. 15, 2024

A previous version of this transcript included the line, "We have also come to his hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now." The correct wording is "We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now."

• History Classics
• Your Profile
• Find History on Facebook (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Twitter (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on YouTube (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Instagram (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on TikTok (Opens in a new window)
• This Day In History
• History Podcasts
• History Vault

‘I Have a Dream’ Speech

By: History.com Editors

Updated: December 19, 2023 | Original: November 30, 2017

The “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr. before a crowd of some 250,000 people at the 1963 March on Washington, remains one of the most famous speeches in history. Weaving in references to the country’s Founding Fathers and the Bible , King used universal themes to depict the struggles of African Americans before closing with an improvised riff on his dreams of equality. The eloquent speech was immediately recognized as a highlight of the successful protest, and has endured as one of the signature moments of the civil rights movement .

Civil Rights Movement Before the Speech

Martin Luther King Jr. , a young Baptist minister, rose to prominence in the 1950s as a spiritual leader of the burgeoning civil rights movement and president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SLCC).

By the early 1960s, African Americans had seen gains made through organized campaigns that placed its participants in harm’s way but also garnered attention for their plight. One such campaign, the 1961 Freedom Rides , resulted in vicious beatings for many participants, but resulted in the Interstate Commerce Commission ruling that ended the practice of segregation on buses and in stations.

Similarly, the Birmingham Campaign of 1963, designed to challenge the Alabama city’s segregationist policies, produced the searing images of demonstrators being beaten, attacked by dogs and blasted with high-powered water hoses.

Around the time he wrote his famed “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King decided to move forward with the idea for another event that coordinated with Negro American Labor Council (NACL) founder A. Philip Randolph’s plans for a job rights march.

March on Washington

Thanks to the efforts of veteran organizer Bayard Rustin, the logistics of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom came together by the summer of 1963.

Joining Randolph and King were the fellow heads of the “Big Six” civil rights organizations: Roy Wilkins of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Whitney Young of the National Urban League (NUL), James Farmer of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Other influential leaders also came aboard, including Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers (UAW) and Joachim Prinz of the American Jewish Congress (AJC).

Scheduled for August 28, the event was to consist of a mile-long march from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, in honor of the president who had signed the Emancipation Proclamation a century earlier, and would feature a series of prominent speakers.

Its stated goals included demands for desegregated public accommodations and public schools, redress of violations of constitutional rights and an expansive federal works program to train employees.

The March on Washington produced a bigger turnout than expected, as an estimated 250,000 people arrived to participate in what was then the largest gathering for an event in the history of the nation’s capital.

Along with notable speeches by Randolph and Lewis, the audience was treated to performances by folk luminaries Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and gospel favorite Mahalia Jackson .

‘I Have a Dream’ Speech Origins

In preparation for his turn at the event, King solicited contributions from colleagues and incorporated successful elements from previous speeches. Although his “I have a dream” segment did not appear in his written text, it had been used to great effect before, most recently during a June 1963 speech to 150,000 supporters in Detroit.

Unlike his fellow speakers in Washington, King didn’t have the text ready for advance distribution by August 27. He didn’t even sit down to write the speech until after arriving at his hotel room later that evening, finishing up a draft after midnight.

‘Free At Last’

As the March on Washington drew to a close, television cameras beamed Martin Luther King’s image to a national audience. He began his speech slowly but soon showed his gift for weaving recognizable references to the Bible, the U.S. Constitution and other universal themes into his oratory.

Pointing out how the country’s founders had signed a “promissory note” that offered great freedom and opportunity, King noted that “Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.'”

At times warning of the potential for revolt, King nevertheless maintained a positive, uplifting tone, imploring the audience to “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. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.”

Mahalia Jackson Prompts MLK: 'Tell 'em About the Dream, Martin'

Around the halfway point of the speech, Mahalia Jackson implored him to “Tell ’em about the ‘Dream,’ Martin.” Whether or not King consciously heard, he soon moved away from his prepared text.

Repeating the mantra, “I have a dream,” he offered up hope 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” and the desire to “transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.”

“And when this happens,” he bellowed in his closing remarks, “and when we allow freedom 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: ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'”

‘I Have a Dream’ Speech Text

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.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. 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 captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. 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 in exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

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.

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."

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. So we have come to cash this check—a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. 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.

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. 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. There will be neither rest nor tranquility 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.

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.

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. 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 march ahead. We cannot turn back. 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."

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.

No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

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. Some of you have come from areas where your 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.

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. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.

I say to you today, my friends, 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.

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."

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.

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.

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, that one day right down 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.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exhalted [sic], 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 is our hope. This is the faith that I will go back to the South with. 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. 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 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. 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. But not only that; let freedom ring from the 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.

And when this happens, and when we allow freedom 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, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

MLK Speech Reception

King’s stirring speech was immediately singled out as the highlight of the successful march.

James Reston of The New York Times wrote that the “pilgrimage was merely a great spectacle” until King’s turn, and James Baldwin later described the impact of King’s words as making it seem that “we stood on a height, and could see our inheritance; perhaps we could make the kingdom real.”

Just three weeks after the march, King returned to the difficult realities of the struggle by eulogizing three of the girls killed in the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.

Still, his televised triumph at the feet of Lincoln brought favorable exposure to his movement, and eventually helped secure the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 . The following year, after the violent Selma to Montgomery march in Alabama, African Americans secured another victory with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 .

Over the final years of his life, King continued to spearhead campaigns for change even as he faced challenges by increasingly radical factions of the movement he helped popularize. Shortly after visiting Memphis, Tennessee, in support of striking sanitation workers, and just hours after delivering another celebrated speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” King was assassinated by shooter James Earl Ray on the balcony of his hotel room on April 4, 1968.

'I Have a Dream' Speech Legacy

Remembered for its powerful imagery and its repetition of a simple and memorable phrase, King’s “I Have a Dream” speech has endured as a signature moment of the civil rights struggle, and a crowning achievement of one of the movement’s most famous faces.

The Library of Congress added the speech to the National Recording Registry in 2002, and the following year the National Park Service dedicated an inscribed marble slab to mark the spot where King stood that day.

In 2016, Time included the speech as one of its 10 greatest orations in history.

HISTORY Vault: Black History

Watch acclaimed Black History documentaries on HISTORY Vault.

“I Have a Dream,” Address Delivered at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute . March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. National Park Service . JFK, A. Philip Randolph and the March on Washington. The White House Historical Association . The Lasting Power of Dr. King’s Dream Speech. The New York Times .

Sign up for Inside History

Get HISTORY’s most fascinating stories delivered to your inbox three times a week.

By submitting your information, you agree to receive emails from HISTORY and A+E Networks. You can opt out at any time. You must be 16 years or older and a resident of the United States.

More details : Privacy Notice | Terms of Use | Contact Us

I Have A Dream Speech

28 pages • 56 minutes read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Essay Analysis

Key Figures

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Summary and Study Guide

Summary: “i have a dream”.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream'' speech is one of the most celebrated oratory pieces in American history. King delivered the speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963 as the final speech of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Ruston organized the march to advocate for civil and economic rights for Black Americans, which was among the largest political rallies for human rights in history, attracting approximately 250,000 attendants. Following the speech, King was named Time magazine’s 1963 Man of the Year. A recording of “I Have a Dream” has been added to the United States National Recording Registry, and a line from the speech—“Out of a mountain of despair, a stone of hope”—is the inscription on the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington D.C.

King opens by stating he is happy to join the audience in a demonstration of freedom. Standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, King notes the Emancipation Proclamation was signed 100 years ago but today, Black people are still not truly free as they lack the same material benefits afforded other Americans. The march is designed to draw attention to that fact.

Get access to this full Study Guide and much more!

• 7,400+ In-Depth Study Guides
• 4,900+ Quick-Read Plot Summaries
• Downloadable PDFs

The marchers are there to redeem a promise, to “cash a check” written to Black people by the US government and the Founding Fathers who promised all men were created equal in both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. “All men” includes African Americans, yet America failed to deliver on its promise. Instead, it has passed a check that cannot be cashed by Black people. King and the marchers, however, refuse to accept that condition and demand the rights promised them.

The marchers are also there to remind the nation that the present is the time to act. Americans should not fall for the trap of making slow and steady progress. Instead, America must today fulfill the full promise of democracy and racial justice. The summer has been one of discontent, but 1963 is a beginning—not an end. The road ahead will lead to an autumn marked with equality for all people so long as the summer’s protests do not result in a return to the complacency of years past.

The SuperSummary difference

• 8x more resources than SparkNotes and CliffsNotes combined
• Study Guides you won ' t find anywhere else
• 100+ new titles every month

King interrupts to warn the audience that the road to freedom must not be laid by bitterness, hatred, or bad behavior—especially violence. Instead, those seeking freedom must hold themselves to a higher moral standard and meet acts of violence with acts of love and faith. It is a good thing Black people are now militant about their freedoms, but they must recognize that there are White people in the crowd who have joined the march and who see their struggle for freedom linked to that of Black Americans. Black people must walk with White people as no one can march alone.

As they march, all must promise to continue marching forward. Many will ask if the marchers will ever be satisfied. The answer is no: They will not be satisfied as long as Black men are victims of police violence, segregation endures, Black people have no upward economic mobility and are disenfranchised. The marchers will not be satisfied until justice and righteousness pour through the nation. 

King turns from the general group (who he has been referring to as “we”) to individual groups (who he refers to as “some of you”). Some present have come from worse struggles than others, some from jails, some from areas in which they have suffered police violence and persecution. But to each of them, King asks them to continue to creatively suffer but to ensure the suffering begets change. He asks them to take that faith back to their home states.

He returns to the group as a whole announcing he still has a dream about the nation. His dream is that America will finally live up to the words of the Founders: “that all men are created equal.” He also dreams White people and Black people will be able to sit down together as equals and Mississippi will be turned from a hotbed of injustice to a land of freedom. He dreams that in the future, people will not be judged by the color of their skin but by who they are as individuals, and that Alabama will be a place where White and Black children can join hands together. With this dream, King will return to the South. And with this dream and this faith, everyone present can transform the nation into one of brotherhood—as long as everyone works together.

One day American children will be able to sing “America (My Country ‘Tis of Thee)” with new meaning, for its lyrics will actually reflect the truth. As a prerequisite for America to become a great nation, freedom must ring across all the majestic landscapes of the United States from New Hampshire to California to Colorado to Tennessee and everywhere in between. And when that happens, “all of God’s children” of all races and faiths will be able to sing the old African American spiritual: “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

This study guide refers to the transcript published by NPR .

Don't Miss Out!

Access Study Guide Now

Related Titles

By Martin Luther King Jr.

A Testament of Hope

Martin Luther King Jr.

I've Been to the Mountaintop

Letter From Birmingham Jail

Stride Toward Freedom

Why We Can't Wait

Featured Collections

Civil Rights & Jim Crow

View Collection

Essays & Speeches

SuperSummary New Releases

I Have a Dream Speech

Martin luther king, jr., ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s I Have a Dream Speech . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

I Have a Dream Speech: Introduction

I have a dream speech: plot summary, i have a dream speech: detailed summary & analysis, i have a dream speech: themes, i have a dream speech: quotes, i have a dream speech: characters, i have a dream speech: symbols, i have a dream speech: theme wheel, brief biography of martin luther king, jr..

Historical Context of I Have a Dream Speech

Other books related to i have a dream speech.

• Full Title: “I Have a Dream”
• When Written: Early 1960s
• When Published: King delivered versions of “I Have a Dream” in North Carolina in 1962 and in Detroit in June of 1963 before delivering the definitive version of the speech at the March on Washington on August 28th, 1963
• Literary Period: civil rights movement
• Genre: Speech, religious sermon
• Climax: King begins calling for freedom to ring out across America, from the “mighty mountains of New York” to the “molehill[s] of Mississippi”
• Point of View: First person

Extra Credit for I Have a Dream Speech

Ringing Into the Future. On August 28th, 2013—the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington—thousands of people gathered on the mall in Washington D.C. where King delivered his iconic speech to celebrate and commemorate the occasion. President Barack Obama spoke at the gathering. Obama paid homage to King while reminding those in attendance that King’s dream was still not yet complete, and that the work of justice and anti-racism is complex and ongoing.

"I Have a Dream"

August 28, 1963

Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered at the 28 August 1963  March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom , synthesized portions of his previous sermons and speeches, with selected statements by other prominent public figures.

King had been drawing on material he used in the “I Have a Dream” speech in his other speeches and sermons for many years. The finale of King’s April 1957 address, “A Realistic Look at the Question of Progress in the Area of Race Relations,” envisioned a “new world,” quoted the song “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” and proclaimed that he had heard “a powerful orator say not so long ago, that … Freedom must ring from every mountain side…. Yes, let it ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado…. Let it ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let it ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let it ring from every mountain and hill of Alabama. From every mountain side, let freedom ring” ( Papers  4:178–179 ).

In King’s 1959 sermon “Unfulfilled Hopes,” he describes the life of the apostle Paul as one of “unfulfilled hopes and shattered dreams” ( Papers  6:360 ). He notes that suffering as intense as Paul’s “might make you stronger and bring you closer to the Almighty God,” alluding to a concept he later summarized in “I Have a Dream”: “unearned suffering is redemptive” ( Papers  6:366 ; King, “I Have a Dream,” 84).

In September 1960, King began giving speeches referring directly to the American Dream. In a speech given that month at a conference of the North Carolina branches of the  National Association for the Advancement of Colored People , King referred to the unexecuted clauses of the preamble to the U.S. Constitution and spoke of America as “a dream yet unfulfilled” ( Papers  5:508 ). He advised the crowd that “we must be sure that our struggle is conducted on the highest level of dignity and discipline” and reminded them not to “drink the poisonous wine of hate,” but to use the “way of nonviolence” when taking “direct action” against oppression ( Papers  5:510 ).

King continued to give versions of this speech throughout 1961 and 1962, then calling it “The American Dream.” Two months before the March on Washington, King stood before a throng of 150,000 people at Cobo Hall in Detroit to expound upon making “the American Dream a reality” (King, Address at Freedom Rally, 70). King repeatedly exclaimed, “I have a dream this afternoon” (King, Address at Freedom Rally, 71). He articulated the words of the prophets Amos and Isaiah, declaring that “justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream,” for “every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low” (King, Address at Freedom Rally, 72). As he had done numerous times in the previous two years, King concluded his message imagining the 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 with the Negroes in the spiritual of old: Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!” (King,  Address at Freedom Rally , 73).

As King and his advisors prepared his speech for the conclusion of the 1963 march, he solicited suggestions for the text. Clarence  Jones   offered a metaphor for the unfulfilled promise of constitutional rights for African Americans, which King incorporated into the final text: “America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned” (King, “I Have a Dream,” 82). Several other drafts and suggestions were posed. References to Abraham Lincoln and the  Emancipation Proclamation  were sustained throughout the countless revisions. King recalled that he did not finish the complete text of the speech until 3:30 A.M. on the morning of 28 August.

Later that day, King stood at the podium overlooking the gathering. Although a typescript version of the speech was made available to the press on the morning of the march, King did not merely read his prepared remarks. He later recalled: “I started out reading the speech, and I read it down to a point … 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” (King, 29 November 1963).

The following day in the  New York Times,  James Reston wrote: “Dr. King touched all the themes of the day, only better than anybody else. He was full of the symbolism of Lincoln and Gandhi, and the cadences of the Bible. He was both militant and sad, and he sent the crowd away feeling that the long journey had been worthwhile” (Reston, “‘I Have a Dream …’”).

Carey to King, 7 June 1955, in  Papers  2:560–561.

Hansen,  The Dream,  2003.

King, Address at the Freedom Rally in Cobo Hall, in  A Call to Conscience , ed. Carson and Shepard, 2001.

King, “I Have a Dream,” Address Delivered at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, in  A Call to Conscience , ed. Carson and Shepard, 2001.

King, Interview by Donald H. Smith, 29 November 1963,  DHSTR-WHi .

King, “The Negro and the American Dream,” Excerpt from Address at the Annual Freedom Mass Meeting of the North Carolina State Conference of Branches of the NAACP, 25 September 1960, in  Papers  5:508–511.

King, “A Realistic Look at the Question of Progress in the Area of Race Relations,” Address Delivered at St. Louis Freedom Rally, 10 April 1957, in  Papers  4:167–179.

King, Unfulfilled Hopes, 5 April 1959, in  Papers  6:359–367.

James Reston, “‘I Have a Dream…’: Peroration by Dr. King Sums Up a Day the Capital Will Remember,”  New York Times , 29 August 1963.

MA in American History : Apply now and enroll in graduate courses with top historians this summer!

• AP US History Study Guide
• History U: Courses for High School Students
• History School: Summer Enrichment
• Lesson Plans
• Classroom Resources
• Spotlights on Primary Sources
• Professional Development (Academic Year)
• Professional Development (Summer)
• Book Breaks
• Inside the Vault
• Self-Paced Courses
• Browse All Resources
• Search by Issue
• Search by Essay
• Become a Member (Free)
• Monthly Offer (Free for Members)
• Program Information
• Scholarships and Financial Aid
• Applying and Enrolling
• Eligibility (In-Person)
• EduHam Online
• Hamilton Cast Read Alongs
• Official Website
• Press Coverage
• Veterans Legacy Program
• The Declaration at 250
• Black Lives in the Founding Era
• Celebrating American Historical Holidays
• Browse All Programs
• Donate Items to the Collection
• Search Our Catalog
• Research Guides
• Rights and Reproductions
• See Our Documents on Display
• Bring an Exhibition to Your Organization
• Interactive Exhibitions Online
• About the Transcription Program
• Civil War Letters
• Founding Era Newspapers
• College Fellowships in American History
• Scholarly Fellowship Program
• Richard Gilder History Prize
• David McCullough Essay Prize
• Affiliate School Scholarships
• Nominate a Teacher
• Eligibility
• State Winners
• National Winners
• Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize
• Gilder Lehrman Military History Prize
• George Washington Prize
• Frederick Douglass Book Prize
• Our Mission and History
• Annual Report
• Contact Information
• Student Advisory Council
• Teacher Advisory Council
• Board of Trustees
• Remembering Richard Gilder
• President's Council
• Scholarly Advisory Board
• Internships
• Our Partners
• Press Releases

History Resources

Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" Speech

By tim bailey, unit overview.

This unit is part of the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s Teaching Literacy through History resources, designed to align to the Common Core State Standards. These units were developed to enable students to understand, summarize, and analyze original texts of historical significance. Through a step-by-step process, students will acquire the skills to analyze and assess primary source material.

Over the course of five lessons, students will read, analyze, and gain a clear understanding of "I Have a Dream," a speech delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr., at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. The first four lessons require students to read excerpts from the speech "like a detective." Through summary organizers, practice, and discussion, they will master the technique of identifying key words, creating summaries of document sections and, as an assessment in the final lesson, writing an argumentative essay.

Unit Objectives

Students will be able to

• Read and demonstrate understanding of a complex document
• Identify the main ideas and synthesize and draw logical inferences from the document
• Summarize the author’s words and restate the author’s meaning in their own words
• Write an argumentative essay using evidence from the document to support their ideas

Number of Class Periods

The unit is structured for 5 class sessions, but Lessons 1 and 2 can be combined and Lessons 3 and 4 can be combined. In addition, the essay could be assigned as a take-home exercise.

Grade Level(s)

Common core state standards.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RH.9-10.1: Cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary sources, attending to such features as the date and origin of the information.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RH.9-10.2: Determine the central ideas or information of a primary source; provide an accurate summary of how key events or ideas develop over the course of the text.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RH.9-10.4: Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including vocabulary describing political, social, or economic aspects of history/social studies.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RH.9-10.5: Analyze how a text uses structure to emphasize key points or advance an explanation or analysis.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.WHST.9-10.4: Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.

Historical Background

On August 28, 1963, approximately a quarter million people converged on Washington, DC. They came from all over the United States to demand civil and economic rights for African Americans. Many traveled for days—and at great personal risk—to participate. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was one of the largest political rallies in history. There were fears of violence, but the huge crowd remained peaceful as they marched from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial.

The last speech of the day was given by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King drew on history—including the Declaration of Independence’s promise of equality and Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation—to highlight how far African Americans were from reaching the American ideal. He urged his audience to demand equal opportunities and access to jobs and facilities and housing and voting. But what transformed the speech into one of the most memorable in American history for the millions of Americans watching and listening in Washington, on radio and on television, was the recurring phrase "I have a dream," repeated eight times with increasing urgency—a dream of what could happen in the nation as well as a more intimate dream of what his own children could achieve when freedom rang everywhere in the United States.

Students will read the first section of the "I Have a Dream" speech given by Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1963. In a step-by-step process they will identify key words employed by King and then summarize the text to demonstrate that they understand what King was saying.

• Understand what was explicitly stated in the speech
• Draw logical inferences
• Summarize a portion of the speech using the author’s words and then their own words
• Teacher Resource:  "I Have a Dream" Speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (excerpts) . Source: Reprinted by arrangement with The Heirs to the Estate of Martin Luther King Jr., c/o Writers House as the proprietor New York, NY. Copyright: © 1963 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. © renewed 1991 Coretta Scott King.
• Summary Organizer #1
• Overhead projector, Elmo projector, or similar device

Note: The first lesson is done as a whole-class exercise.

• Tell the students that they will be exploring what Martin Luther King, Jr., said in the "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. Resist the temptation to provide more information as you want the students to develop ideas based solely on King’s words.
• Read aloud the excerpts from the "I Have a Dream" speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., and ask the students to read it silently to themselves. It is important for the students to experience a text as the writer meant it to be experienced—in this case as a speech before a large crowd.
• Tell the students that they will be analyzing the first selection from the document today and learning how to do in-depth analysis for themselves. The whole class will be going through this process together for the first section of the document.
• Pass out Summary Organizer #1, which includes the first section of the speech. Display the organizer in a format large enough for the whole class to see. Make certain students understand that the original text has been edited for this lesson. Explain the purpose and use of ellipses.
• "Share read" the text with the students. This is done by having the students follow along silently while you begin to read aloud, modeling prosody, inflection, and punctuation. Then ask the class to join in with the reading after a few sentences while you continue to read aloud, still serving as the model for the class. This technique will support struggling readers as well as English language learners (ELL).
• Explain that the objective is to select "Key Words" from the first section and then use those words to create a brief summary of the text that gets at the gist of what Dr. King was saying.
• Guidelines for Selecting Key Words: Key Words are very important contributors to understanding the text. They are usually nouns or verbs. Don’t pick "connector" words ( are , is , the , and , so , etc.). The number of Key Words depends on the length of the original selection. This selection is 249 words long so you can pick up to ten Key Words. The students must know what their Key Words mean, so there will be opportunities to teach students how to use context clues, word analysis, and dictionary skills to discover word meanings.
• Ask the students to select up to ten words from the text that they believe are Key Words and write them down on their organizers.
• Survey the class to find out what the most popular choices were. After some discussion and with your guidance, the class should decide on ten Key Words. For example, let’s say that the class decides on the following words: freedom , Emancipation Proclamation (two words that together make up a single idea can be selected if it makes sense in context), hope , Negro , segregation , discrimination , shameful , Declaration of Independence , promise , and unalienable rights . Now, no matter which words the students had previously selected, have them write the words agreed upon by the class or chosen by you into the Key Word list.
• Explain that the class will use these Key Words to write a brief summary (one or two sentences) that demonstrates an understanding of what King was saying. This exercise should be a whole-class discussion-and-negotiation process. For example, "The Emancipation Proclamation brought hope, but segregation and discrimination are still part of Negro life. That is shameful because the Declaration of Independence promised all people unalienable rights." You might find that the class doesn’t need some of the Key Words, which will make the summary even more streamlined. This is part of the negotiation process. The final sentence(s) should be copied into the organizer.
• Now guide the students in putting the summary sentence(s) into their own words. Again, this is a class negotiation process. For example "African Americans were promised the same rights as everyone else, but that hasn’t happened yet."
• Wrap up: Discuss vocabulary that the students found confusing or difficult. You could have students use the back of their organizer or a separate vocabulary form to make a note of these words and their meaning.

Students will read the second section of the "I Have a Dream" speech given by Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1963. In a step-by-step process they will identify key words employed by King and then summarize the text to demonstrate that they understand what King was saying.

• Summary Organizer #2

Note: For this lesson, the students will be working with partners and in small groups.

• Review what the class did in the previous lesson and what they decided was the gist of the first selection from King’s speech.
• Distribute Summary Organizer #2 and display a copy in a format large enough for the whole class to see. Tell the students that they will work on the second section of the document with partners and in small groups.
• Share read the second selection with the students as described in Lesson 1.
• Review the process of selecting Key Words, writing a summary of the text using those words, and then restating the summary in their own words to show their understanding of King’s words.
• Pair the students up and have them work together to select the best Key Words. This passage is 258 words, so they can choose up to ten words.
• Now put two pairs of students together. These four students will negotiate with each other to come up with their final ten Key Words. Be strategic in how you make your groups in order to ensure the most participation by all group members.
• Once the groups have selected their Key Words, each group will use those words to create a brief summary (one or two sentences) of what Martin Luther King was saying. During this process, try to make sure that everyone is contributing. It is very easy for one student to take control and for the other students to let them do so. All of the students should write their group’s negotiated sentence into their organizers.
• Ask groups to share out the summary sentences that they have created. This should start a teacher-led discussion that points out the qualities of the various responses. How successful were the groups at getting at King’s main idea, and were they careful to use the Key Words in doing so?
• Now direct the groups to restate their summary sentences in their own words. Again, this is a group negotiation process. After they have decided on a summary, it should be written into their organizers. Again, have the groups share out their responses and discuss the clarity and quality of the responses.
• Wrap up: Discuss vocabulary that the students found confusing or difficult. If you choose you could have students use the back of their organizer or separate vocabulary form to make a note of these words and their meaning.

Students will read the third section of the "I Have a Dream" speech given by Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1963. In a step-by-step process they will identify key words employed by King and then summarize the text to demonstrate that they understand what King was saying.

• Summary Organizer #3

Note: For this lesson students will work individually unless you decide they still need the support of a group.

• Review what the class did in the previous two lessons and what they decided was the gist of the first two selections.
• Distribute Summary Organizer #3 with the third selection from King’s speech. You may decide to share read the third selection with the students as in prior lessons or have them read it silently to themselves.
• Review the process of selecting Key Words, writing a summary using the key words, and then restating the summary in the students’ own words to demonstrate their understanding of King’s words. This text is 237 words, so the students can pick up to ten words.
• After the students have worked through the three steps, have them share out their summaries in their own words and guide a class discussion of the meaning of the text.
• Wrap up: Discuss vocabulary that the students found confusing or difficult. If you choose you could have students use the back of their organizer or a separate vocabulary form to make a note of these words and their meaning.

Students will read the fourth section of the "I Have a Dream" speech given by Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1963. In a step-by-step process they will identify key words employed by King and then summarize the text to demonstrate that they understand what King was saying.

• Summary Organizer #4

Note: Students will continue to work independently in this lesson.

• Review what the class did in the previous lessons and what they decided was the gist of the first three selections.
• Distribute Summary Organizer #4 with the fourth selection from King’s speech. You may decide to share read the text with the students as in prior lessons or have them read it silently to themselves.
• Review the process of selecting Key Words, writing a summary using the key words, and then restating the summary in the students’ own words to demonstrate their understanding of King’s words. There are 224 words in this selection, so the students can select eight or nine key words.
• After the students have worked through the three steps, have them share out their summaries in their own words and guide a class discussion of the meaning of King’s words.

The class will first review the meaning of each section of Martin Luther King’s "I Have a Dream" speech. Second, the students will look closely at how Dr. King constructed his speech, particularly his choice of words. Finally, they will write about Dr. King’s speech in a short argumentative essay in which they support their statements with evidence taken directly from Martin Luther King’s own words.

• Synthesize the work of the prior four days
• Demonstrate an understanding of the meaning of the primary source
• Analyze the writing craft (speech construction, rhetorical style)
• Explain and defend whether they believe the craft and style makes the speech more effective
• Write an argumentative essay based on evidence in the text 
• Summary Organizers #1–4 from previous lessons
• The students should have the four Summary Organizers they completed in the previous lessons.
• Review the work from the previous lessons by asking the students to provide a summary in their own words of each of the four text selections. This is done as a class discussion. Write these short negotiated sentences on the overhead or similar device so the whole class can see them. These summaries should reinforce the students’ understanding of the meaning of King’s speech.
• Discuss with the students Dr. King’s rhetorical style as well as how the construction of the speech affects its meaning. How does repeating certain phrases strengthen his point or focus his arguments? How does the construction help guide the audience?
• If the students do not have experience writing an argumentative essay, proceed with a short lesson on essay writing. Otherwise, have them write a short essay in response to one of the prompts in class or as an out-of-class assignment. Remind the students that they must back up any arguments they make with evidence taken directly from the text of King’s "I Have a Dream" speech. The first prompt is designed to be the easiest.
• What is Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream, and according to Dr. King how could it become a reality?
• In his speech Dr. King says that "we have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check." What does he mean by this and what, as he sees it, will be the result of this action?
• In his speech, how does Dr. King respond to the question, "When will you be satisfied?" Explain both the reason for this question put to civil rights activists and Dr. King’s response.

Stay up to date, and subscribe to our quarterly newsletter.

Learn how the Institute impacts history education through our work guiding teachers, energizing students, and supporting research.

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Critic’s Notebook

The Lasting Power of Dr. King’s Dream Speech

By Michiko Kakutani

• Aug. 27, 2013

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. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. finally stepped to the lectern, in front of the Lincoln Memorial, to address the crowd of 250,000 gathered on the National Mall.

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. Unlike many of the day’s previous speakers, he did not talk about particular bills before Congress or the marchers’ demands. 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.

Dr. 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. 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.

With his improvised riff, Dr. King took a leap into history, jumping from prose to poetry, from the podium to the pulpit. His voice arced into an emotional crescendo as he turned from a sobering assessment of current social injustices to a radiant vision of hope — of what America could be. “I have a dream,” he declared, “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!”

Many in the crowd that afternoon, 50 years ago on Wednesday, had taken buses and trains from around the country. 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. But if people were tired after a long day, they were absolutely electrified by Dr. King. There was reverent silence when he began speaking, and when he started to talk about his dream, they called out, “Amen,” and, “Preach, Dr. King, preach,” offering, in the words of his adviser Clarence B. Jones, “every version of the encouragements you would hear in a Baptist church multiplied by tens of thousands.”

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.”

Dr. King’s speech was not only the heart and emotional cornerstone of the March on Washington, but also a testament to the transformative powers of one man and the magic of his words. Fifty years later, it is a speech that can still move people to tears. Fifty years later, its most famous lines are recited by schoolchildren and sampled by musicians. Fifty years later, the four words “I have a dream” have become shorthand for Dr. King’s commitment to freedom, social justice and nonviolence, inspiring activists from Tiananmen Square to Soweto, Eastern Europe to the West Bank.

Why does Dr. King’s “Dream” speech exert such a potent hold on people around the world and across the generations? Part of its resonance resides in Dr. King’s moral imagination. Part of it resides in his masterly oratory and gift for connecting with his audience — be they on the Mall that day in the sun or watching the speech on television or, decades later, viewing it online. And part of it resides in his ability, developed over a lifetime, to convey the urgency of his arguments through language richly layered with biblical and historical meanings.

The son, grandson and great-grandson of Baptist ministers, Dr. 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. At the same time, the sonorous cadences and ringing, metaphor-rich language of the King James Bible came instinctively to him. Quotations from the Bible, along with its vivid imagery, suffused his writings, and he used them to put the sufferings of African-Americans in the context of Scripture — to give black audience members encouragement and hope, and white ones a visceral sense of identification.

In his “Dream” speech, Dr. King alludes to a famous passage from Galatians, when he speaks of “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.” As he did in many of his sermons, he also drew parallels between “the Negro” still an “exile in his own land” and the plight of the Israelites in Exodus, who, with God on their side, found deliverance from hardship and oppression, escaping slavery in Egypt to journey toward the Promised Land.

The entire March on Washington speech reverberates with biblical rhythms and parallels, and bristles with a panoply of references to other historical and literary texts that would have resonated with his listeners. In addition to allusions to the prophets Isaiah (“I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low”) and Amos (“We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream”), there are echoes of the Declaration of Independence (“the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”); Shakespeare (“this sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent”); and popular songs like Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” (“Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York,” “Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California”).

Such references added amplification and depth of field to the speech, much the way T. S. Eliot’s myriad allusions in “The Waste Land” add layered meaning to that poem. Dr. King, who had a doctorate in theology and once contemplated a career in academia, was shaped by both his childhood in his father’s church and his later studies of disparate thinkers like Reinhold Niebuhr, Gandhi and Hegel. Along the way, he developed a gift for synthesizing assorted ideas and motifs and making them his own — a gift that enabled him to address many different audiences at once, while making ideas that some might find radical somehow familiar and accessible. It was a gift that in some ways mirrored his abilities as the leader of the civil rights movement, tasked with holding together often contentious factions (from more militant figures like Stokely Carmichael to more conservative ones like Roy Wilkins), while finding a way to balance the concerns of grass-roots activists with the need to forge a working alliance with the federal government.

At the same time, Dr. King was also able to nestle his arguments within a historical continuum, lending them the authority of tradition and the weight of association. For some, in his audience, the articulation of his dream for America would have evoked conscious or unconscious memories of Langston Hughes’s call in a 1935 poem to “let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed” and W. E. B. Du Bois’s description of the “wonderful America, which the founding fathers dreamed.” His final lines in the March on Washington speech come from a Negro spiritual reminding listeners of slaves’ sustaining faith in the possibility of liberation: “Free at last, free at last; thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”

For those less familiar with African-American music and literature, there were allusions with immediate, patriotic connotations. Much the way Lincoln redefined the founders’ vision of America in his Gettysburg Address by invoking the Declaration of Independence, so Dr. King in his “Dream” speech makes references to both the Gettysburg Address and the Declaration of Independence. These deliberate echoes helped universalize the moral underpinnings of the civil rights movement and emphasized that its goals were only as revolutionary as the founding fathers’ original vision of the United States. Dr. King’s dream for America’s “citizens of color” was no more, no less than the American Dream of a country where “all men are created equal.”

As for Dr. King’s quotation of “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” — an almost de facto national anthem, familiar even to children — it underscored civil rights workers’ patriotic belief in the project of reinventing America. For Dr. King, it might have elicited personal memories, too. The night his home was bombed during the bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., endangering the lives of his wife, Coretta, and their infant daughter, he calmed the crowd gathered in front of their house, saying, “I want you to love our enemies.” Some of his supporters reportedly broke into song, including hymns and “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.”

The March on Washington and Dr. King’s “Dream” speech would play an important role in helping pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the pivotal Selma to Montgomery march that he led in 1965 would provide momentum for the passage later that year of the Voting Rights Act. Though Dr. King received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 , his exhausting schedule (he had been giving hundreds of speeches a year) and his frustration with schisms in the civil rights movement and increasing violence in the country led to growing weariness and depression before his assassination in 1968.

The knowledge that Dr. King gave his life to the cause lends an added poignancy to the experience of hearing his speeches today. And so does being reminded now — in the second term of Barack Obama’s presidency — of the dire state of race relations in the early 1960s, when towns in the South still had separate schools, restaurants, hotels and bathrooms for blacks and whites, and discrimination in housing and employment was prevalent across the country. Only two and a half months before the “Dream” speech, Gov. George Wallace had stood in a doorway at the University of Alabama in an attempt to block two black students from trying to register; the next day the civil rights activist Medgar Evers was assassinated in front of his home in Jackson, Miss.

President Obama, who once wrote about his mother’s coming home “with books on the civil rights movement, the recordings of Mahalia Jackson, the speeches of Dr. King,” has described the leaders of the movement as “giants whose shoulders we stand on.” Some of his own speeches owe a clear debt to Dr. King’s ideas and words.

In his 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address, which brought him to national attention, Mr. Obama channeled Dr. King’s vision of hope, speaking of coming “together as one American family.” In his 2008 speech about race, he talked, much as Dr. King had, of continuing “on the path of a more perfect union.” And in his 2007 speech commemorating the 1965 Selma march, he echoed Dr. King’s remarks about Exodus, describing Dr. King and the other civil rights leaders as members of the Moses generation who “pointed the way” and “took us 90 percent of the way there.” He and his contemporaries were their heirs, Mr. Obama said — they were members of the Joshua generation with the responsibility of finishing “the journey Moses had begun.”

Dr. King knew it would not be easy to “transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood” — difficulties that persist today with new debates over voter registration laws and the Trayvon Martin shooting. Dr. King probably did not foresee a black president celebrating the 50th anniversary of his speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial, and surely did not foresee a monument to himself just a short walk away. But he did dream of a future in which the country embarked on “the sunlit path of racial justice,” and he foresaw, with bittersweet prescience, that 1963, as he put it, was “not an end, but a beginning.”

Follow Michiko Kakutani on Twitter: @michikokakutani

“I Have A Dream”: Annotated

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s iconic speech, annotated with relevant scholarship on the literary, political, and religious roots of his words.

For this month’s Annotations, we’ve taken Martin Luther King, Jr.’s iconic “I Have A Dream” speech, and provided scholarly analysis of its groundings and inspirations—the speech’s religious, political, historical and cultural underpinnings are wide-ranging and have been read as jeremiad, call to action, and literature. While the speech itself has been used (and sometimes misused) to call for a “color-blind” country, its power is only increased by knowing its rhetorical and intellectual antecedents.      

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand signed the Emancipation Proclamation . 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 captivity.

But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free. 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 languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition.

In a sense we have 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 would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

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 which has come back marked “insufficient funds.” 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. So we have come to cash this check — a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now . 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 rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God’s children. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment and to underestimate the determination of the Negro. 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. 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. There will be neither rest nor tranquility 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.

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. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to 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 and their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.

And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” 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 a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

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 cells. Some of you have come from areas where your 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.

Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, 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. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.

I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream .

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.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four 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.

I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor’s lips are presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted , 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 is our hope. This is the faith with which I return to the South. 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 . 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.

Weekly Newsletter

Get your fix of JSTOR Daily’s best stories in your inbox each Thursday.

Privacy Policy   Contact Us You may unsubscribe at any time by clicking on the provided link on any marketing message.

This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with a new meaning, “My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.”

And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. 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 snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California!

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 every molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

When we let freedom 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, “Free at last! free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

For dynamic annotations of this speech and other iconic works, see The Understanding Series from JSTOR Labs .

Support JSTOR Daily! Join our new membership program on Patreon today.

JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. JSTOR Daily readers can access the original research behind our articles for free on JSTOR.

Get Our Newsletter

More stories.

• Colorful Lights to Cure What Ails You

• Ayahs Abroad: Colonial Nannies Cross The Empire

The Taj Mahal Today

Beryl Markham, Warrior of the Skies

Recent posts.

• The Industrial Revolution and the Rise of Policing
• A Brief Guide to Birdwatching in the Age of Dinosaurs
• Vulture Cultures

Support JSTOR Daily

Sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Why “I Have A Dream” Remains One Of History’s Greatest Speeches

Monday will mark the holiday in honor of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Texas A&M University Professor of Communication Leroy Dorsey is reflecting on King’s celebrated “I Have a Dream” speech, one which he said is a masterful use of rhetorical traditions.

King delivered the famous speech as he stood before a crowd of 250,000 people in front of the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28, 1963 during the “March on Washington.” The speech was televised live to an audience of millions.

“He was not just speaking to African Americans, but to all Americans” ~ Leroy Dorsey

Dorsey , associate dean for inclusive excellence and strategic initiatives in the College of Liberal Arts, said one of the reasons the speech stands above all of King’s other speeches – and nearly every other speech ever written – is because its themes are timeless. “It addresses issues that American culture has faced from the beginning of its existence and still faces today: discrimination, broken promises, and the need to believe that things will be better,” he said.

Powerful Use of Rhetorical Devices

Dorsey said the speech is also notable for its use of several rhetorical traditions, namely the Jeremiad, metaphor-use and repetition.

The Jeremiad is a form of early American sermon that narratively moved audiences from recognizing the moral standard set in its past to a damning critique of current events to the need to embrace higher virtues.

“King does that with his invocation of several ‘holy’ American documents such as the Emancipation Proclamation and Declaration of Independence as the markers of what America is supposed to be,” Dorsey said. “Then he moves to the broken promises in the form of injustice and violence. And he then moves to a realization that people need to look to one another’s character and not their skin color for true progress to be made.”

Second, King’s use of metaphors explains U.S. history in a way that is easy to understand, Dorsey said.

“Metaphors can be used to connect an unknown or confusing idea to a known idea for the audience to better understand,” he said. For example, referring to founding U.S. documents as “bad checks” transformed what could have been a complex political treatise into the simpler ideas that the government had broken promises to the American people and that this was not consistent with the promise of equal rights.

The third rhetorical device found in the speech, repetition, is used while juxtaposing contrasting ideas, setting up a rhythm and cadence that keeps the audience engaged and thoughtful, Dorsey said.

“I have a dream” is repeated while contrasting “sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners” and “judged by the content of their character” instead of “judged by the color of their skin.” The device was used also with “let freedom ring” which juxtaposes states that were culturally polar opposites – Colorado, California and New York vs. Georgia, Tennessee and Mississippi.

Words That Moved A Movement

The March on Washington and King’s speech are widely considered turning points in the Civil Rights Movement, shifting the demand and demonstrations for racial equality that had mostly occurred in the South to a national stage.

Dorsey said the speech advanced and solidified the movement because “it became the perfect response to a turbulent moment as it tried to address past hurts, current indifference and potential violence, acting as a pivot point between the Kennedy administration’s slow response and the urgent response of the ‘marvelous new militancy’ [those fighting against racism].”

What made King such an outstanding orator were the communication skills he used to stir audience passion, Dorsey said. “When you watch the speech, halfway through he stops reading and becomes a pastor, urging his flock to do the right thing,” he said. “The cadence, power and call to the better nature of his audience reminds you of a religious service.”

Lessons For Today

Dorsey said the best leaders are those who can inspire all without dismissing some, and that King in his famous address did just that.

“He was not just speaking to African Americans in that speech, but to all Americans, because he understood that the country would more easily rise together when it worked together,” he said.

“I Have a Dream” remains relevant today “because for as many strides that have been made, we’re still dealing with the elements of a ‘bad check’ – voter suppression, instances of violence against people of color without real redress, etc.,” Dorsey said. “Remembering what King was trying to do then can provide us insight into what we need to consider now.”

Additionally, King understood that persuasion doesn’t move from A to Z in one fell swoop, but it moves methodically from A to B, B to C, etc., Dorsey said. “In the line ‘I have a dream that one day ,’ he recognized that things are not going to get better overnight, but such sentiment is needed to help people stay committed day-to-day until the country can honestly say, ‘free at last!'”

Media contact: Lesley Henton, 979-845-5591, [email protected].

Related Stories

MSC SCOLA Illuminates Path To Success

The three-day Student Conference on Latinx Affairs offers opportunities for learning, leadership and growth.

Asian Pacific Islander Desi American Heritage Month Events

A variety of campus organizations are inviting the Aggie community for unique cultural experiences.

MSC SCOLA 2023: ‘Focusing On The Present To Ensure Our Future’

The MSC Student Conference On Latinx Affairs (SCOLA) will challenge student leaders to focus on the influence of the Latinx community.

Recent Stories

Is Smallpox Still A Threat?

A Texas A&M scientist has collaborated on a new report that warns of its potential return and urges heightened preparedness.

Workplace Law Expert Examines Starbucks Supreme Court Bid

Starbucks is seeking protection from being ordered to rehire baristas who say they were fired for union-promoting activities. Professor Michael Z. Green explains how the case could affect the right to organize unions in the U.S.

Freestanding Emergency Departments Are Popular, But Do They Function As Intended?

School of Public Health study is the first of its kind to compare characteristics of visits among all emergency department types

Subscribe to the Texas A&M Today newsletter for the latest news and stories every week.

Martin Luther King Jr. assassination anniversary: Here are 5 landmarks that reveal civil rights struggle

Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead 56 years ago today in Memphis, Tennessee . 

His assassin "hoped to kill MLK's great and widespread dream of unity," Alveda King, the civil rights leader's niece, posted on Thursday morning, April 4, on social media.

The killer failed in his mission, King wrote in her message. 

CHRISTIAN FILMMAKER JIM WAHLBERG SAYS MOTHER TERESA ‘LED ME’ TO GOD AND TO SOBRIETY IN PRISON

"Praise God … The dream didn't die with my uncle. His dream is alive, and so are our dreams; for our Lord Jesus is alive," she wrote.

The night before he was murdered, the powerful orator thundered prophetically from the pulpit of Bishop Charles Mason Temple in Memphis, "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."

READ ON THE FOX NEWS APP

King Jr.'s death was only the first of several tragedies suffered by the family. Rev. A.D. King, Martin's little brother – Alveda King's father – died under mysterious circumstances the following year.

Her grandmother, Alberta King, also died shockingly. She was shot dead in 1974 in front of a Sunday congregation at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia from where the King family led the civil rights movement.

King Jr.'s life on Earth ended in Memphis. But the civil rights movement he led marched across a vast swath of the country. 

Alveda King, when asked by Fox News Digital, suggested visiting these five landmarks in the civil rights movement to learn more about the march for justice – and the price paid by her family. 

Rev. A.D. King, just 18 months younger than his brother Martin Jr., was ministering at the First Baptist Church of Ensley and leading the Birmingham Campaign of the civil rights movement in the tumultuous year of 1963.

MEET THE AMERICAN WHO GAVE BIRTH TO THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT, ALBERTA KING, ‘GAVE HER ALL FOR CHRIST’

Two bombs exploded at the reverend's home in an assassination attempt on May 11, while he was home with his wife, Naomi, and five children – including Alveda King, who was just 12 years old at the time.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Sr. and his wife Alberta (Williams) King lived in a beautiful Queen Anne-style home at 501 Auburn Ave. when they welcomed three children: daughter Willie Christine and her younger brothers, Martin Jr. and Alfred Daniel (A.D.).

The home today is a centerpiece of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park. 

The home is closed for an "extensive rehabilitation project" through Nov. 2025 following an attempted arson attack in December 2023. 

The exterior remains a coveted bucket-list destination for photographs and selfies. 

The congregation was founded in 1886 with just 13 members. Rev. Adam Daniel Williams, MLK's Jr. grandfather, became minister in 1894. 

MEET THE AMERICAN WHO WROTE ‘THE BATTLE HYMN OF THE REPUBLIC’

The church blossomed and became the spiritual headquarters of the civil rights movement under the Williams-King family by the 1950s. 

The church also grew famous for its choir and music , led by Alberta King, Martin Jr.'s mother. The choir performed at the Atlanta premier of the movie "Gone with the Wind" in 1939.  

Martin Luther King Jr. was both baptized at and mourned from Ebenezer Baptist on April 9, 1968. The funerals for both his brother and mother were held at the church, as well. 

The bridge over the Alabama River became the center of global attention on March 7, 1965, as civil rights demonstrators, marching to Birmingham in favor of voting rights, met a violent response on "Bloody Sunday."

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR OUR LIFESTYLE NEWSLETTER

"The televised attacks were seen all over the nation, prompting public support for the civil rights activists in Selma and for the voting rights campaign," writes CivilRightsTrail.com.

The Edmund Pettus Bridget today is a National Historic Landmark and the frequent site of events and commemorations in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. and the battle for civil rights.

Now the Bayfront Motel, the Monson Motor Lodge was the scene of one of the most unusual and disturbing events in the march for civil rights.

Alveda King cited it as a nearly forgotten event that speaks to the dangers faced by civil rights activists.

A bi-racial group of people plunged into the motor-lodge swimming pool on June 18, 1964, to protest segregation. 

James Brock, the manager of the inn, responded by pouring acid into the pool – a potentially disfiguring and even deadly attack. 

Photos of the shocking incident hit newspapers nationally. 

"The searing image helped propel passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, outlawing discrimination in public places," First Coast News of Florida wrote last year.

For more Lifestyle articles, visit www.foxnews.com/lifestyle .

Original article source: Martin Luther King Jr. assassination anniversary: Here are 5 landmarks that reveal civil rights struggle

As we mark Martin Luther King Jr.'s tragic death, let's recommit to the fight for justice

Let us honor dr. martin luther king jr.'s memory not just in words, but in deeds. let us make our voices heard, make our vote count, and demand fiscal accountability..

Dr. Russ Wigginton is president of the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

In the annals of civil rights history, April 4, 1968, marks a solemn day of reckoning. It was the day Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., an icon of peace and justice, was tragically assassinated in Memphis at the Lorraine Motel, where the National Civil Rights Museum now stands.

As the Museum commemorates this pivotal moment, it’s imperative to reflect on Dr. King’s remarkable legacy and the enduring relevance of his vision for economic justice.

Dr. King was not supposed to be in Memphis in late March and early April of 1968.  He allegedly had a bigger calling in preparing for the Poor People’s Campaign .  But Dr. King recognized that the Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike was more than striking workers demanding better wages and working conditions; they were Black men asserting their dignity and seeking recognition of their humanity.  

Dr. King’s commitment to economic justice extended beyond the Memphis strike. It found expression in his advocacy for a guaranteed annual Income — a radical idea aimed at eradicating poverty and uplifting the marginalized. This initiative was a central component of his Poor People’s Campaign, which sought to address the root causes of economic inequality. Dr. King understood that the United States could only reach its full potential if all individuals had access to basic necessities and economic security.

Guest column: National Civil Rights Museum is advancing Martin Luther King's economic justice mission

We have made progress, but still struggle with poverty

Fast forward to the present, and the echoes of Dr. King’s economic justice legacy reverberate through our society.

If Dr. King were alive today, I have no doubt that he would acknowledge many of the signs of progress that we can measure over the last 56 years. 

But without question, he would be disturbed by the unconscionable numbers who live in poverty in a nation of unparalleled wealth. 

He would call into question the inequities that exist in foundational areas like housing, health care, and education.

He would have the courage to challenge the power structure for the good of the people. 

He would still be willing to claim the sobering truth that power is wielded by those prioritizing profits over people.

Dismantle systemic barriers to economic equity

When Dr. King was speaking truth to power in April 1968, he reminded us all that we have the power to effect change. History has shown us that change is possible when we unite behind a common cause.

By exercising our right to vote and holding our elected officials accountable, we can demand resource allocation that reflects our moral priorities—a budget that prioritizes investments in education, healthcare, the environment, and infrastructure.

We can advocate for policies that uplift the marginalized and dismantle systemic barriers to economic equity.

As we commemorate Dr. King’s legacy, let us recommit ourselves to the fight for economic justice.

Let us honor his memory not just in words, but in deeds. Let us make our voices heard, make our vote count, and demand fiscal accountability that builds a future where economic justice is not just a dream, but a reality.

Read Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech in its entirety

Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. addresses the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., where he gave his "I Have a Dream" speech on Aug. 28, 1963, as part of the March on Washington.

Agence France Presse / AFP via Getty Images

Monday marks Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Below is a transcript of his celebrated “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered on Aug. 28, 1963, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. NPR’s Talk of the Nation aired the speech in 2010 — listen to that broadcast at the audio link above.

Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders gather before a rally at the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28, 1963, in Washington.

National Archives / National Archives/Hulton Archive via Getty Images

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.: Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. 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.

But 100 years later, the Negro still is not free. 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 in exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. 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.

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.

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.

We have also come to his hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. 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 quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.

Civil rights protesters march from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial for the March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963.

Kurt Severin / Three Lions/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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. 1963 is not an end, but a beginning. 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.

There will be neither rest nor tranquility 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.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

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. Some of you have come from areas where your 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. 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.

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.

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. 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.

People clap and sing along to a freedom song between speeches at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963.

Express Newspapers / Express Newspapers via Getty Images

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.

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.

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 down 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. I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, 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 is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. 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. 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 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. 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 snowcapped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California. 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.

And when this happens, and when we allow freedom 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: Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last.

Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

OPB’s First Look newsletter

Related stories.

National forests and park lands will waive their fees MLK Day, including in Oregon and Washington

Nearly all forest service trailheads, boat launches and day use areas are free for the day.

What Would King Say Today?: A Theme At Skanner 33rd Annual MLK Breakfast

Hundreds of people, including Gov. Kate Brown and Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, gathered in Jantzen Beach Monday to celebrate the life and the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. at the Skanner Foundation’s 33rd annual MLK breakfast.

Streaming Now

Martin Luther King III talks about his father, his name, history and hope

As one might expect, Martin Luther King III experiences what he describes as "myriad emotions" when he returns to Memphis, the city where his world-famous and world-changing father was felled by an assassin's bullet on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in 1968.

“I remember April 4, 56 years ago, the Thursday night my dad was killed,” said King, who was 10 years old at the time. “But I also remember April 8, which was a Monday, the day that my mom took the three of us older children to Memphis to continue the work he was engaged in and lead a demonstration.”

"Mrs. King Leads Silent March in Memphis Tribute to Late Husband" stated the headline at the top of the front page of that day's edition of the evening newspaper, the Memphis Press-Scimitar.

The boldface type ran above a panoramic photograph of thousands of marchers — 14,000, according to the Press-Scimitar — crowding Main Street, with young Martin Luther King III in front, between his older sister, Yolanda, who was flanked by singer Harry Belafonte, and younger brother, Dexter, who was next to the children's mother, Coretta Scott King. She was dressed in black, and the boys wore suitcoats and ties.

"I'm not a big emotional crier," Martin Luther King III said in a Zoom interview Tuesday. "But this morning something triggered an emotion, and it's largely because of the sadness of where we are as a nation 56 years after my dad's passing."

He said America seems to be moving "backward" to a less progressive era of political incivility and anti-democratic tendencies.

"We need to look at ourselves and what we have done or have not done to move our society forward," he said. "We truly hope the nation, which is so divided, can find a true path rooted in peace and justice and equity."

A human rights champion like his father, King and his activist family — his wife, Arndrea Waters King, and daughter, Yolanda Renee King — will be in Memphis on Thursday to take part in an annual event: the free public celebration of the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that is held each April 4 at the National Civil Rights Museum.

This year's edition of the event is titled " Remembering MLK: The Man. The Movement. The Moment. " The commemoration is set to begin at 4:30 p.m. and end with a moment of silence at 6:05 p.m. — the time when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed outside his room at the Lorraine Motel, which was preserved in the construction of the civil rights museum, which opened in 1991.

Martin Luther King III will speak during the commemoration, and the King family for the first time will participate in the ceremonial placement of a new wreath on the balcony outside Room 306, where Dr. King was staying at the time of his assassination, after having traveled to Memphis to support the city's striking sanitation workers. The event also will feature music and performances by the museum's youth poetry and spoken word competition winners.

Arndrea King said daughter Yolanda, now 15, had visited the museum for the first time only a year ago, because "we wanted to go at a time when she was old enough to understand the significance." Yolanda, however, is hardly unaware of her grandfather's impact. Emerging as an activist herself, last week she addressed the United Nations General Assembly as the invited “youth speaker” on March 25, which the UN designates as "International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade."

Arndrea King said the National Civil Rights Museum is "very important," in large part because it preserves and illustrates the history of race relations in the United States.

“It’s not about collective guilt, it’s about collective responsibility," said Arndrea King, decrying legislative efforts in states such as Tennessee to suppress honest instruction about slavery and the civil rights struggle.

“The fact is, our daughter, who is Dr. King’s only grandchild, at almost 16 years old, has fewer rights now than she had on the day she was born," she said.

She said that laws and court decisions since Yolanda’s birth in 2008 have “decimated” voting rights, “struck down” affirmative action initiatives, and restricted “reproductive freedom” for women, in a regressive assault on individual and democratic rights “that has not happened since Reconstruction.”

Martin Luther King III is Dr. King's eldest son and the second of Dr. King's four children. The first-born child, Yolanda King, died at 51 in 2007. Dr. King's other son, Dexter King, died Jan. 22 at 62. The other surviving child is Bernice King, 60, a lawyer and minister.

King said his famous "Martin Luther King" name has been more a blessing than a burden, thanks to the encouragement of his mother, "liberated" by telling him to be his own man.

"If I had to wake up every day trying to fill the shoes of Martin Luther King Jr., I would would fail miserably," he said.

Nonetheless, King is former president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (his father was the founding president); and he and Arndrea King currently head up the Drum Major Institute, a group founded in 1961 to encourage the world to realize "Dr. King’s vision of a world free of racism, poverty and violence," according to the organization's website .

“We’re doing everything we can to see that democracy prevails,” he said, noting that the Drum Major Institute ― intended for people who want to be “drum majors for peace, justice and equity” ― has awarded numerous grants supporting voter-registration efforts.

Said King: “The candidacy of Mr. Trump is not just divisive. He’s told us he want to be a dictator, and there’s an old saying: 'When someone tells you who they are, you need to listen to them.'"

For more information, visit civilrightsmuseum.org .