I Have a Dream

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  "I Have a Dream" was delivered by Martin Luther King Jr. on the 28th of August 1963, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. More than 250,000 people stood before him on that day. A scholar poll conducted in 1999 would later rank it the top American speech of the entire 20th century. One journalist called it the greatest speech in the English language of all time. What made a single address on a summer afternoon carry that weight? And how much of its most famous passage was never planned at all?

  The march that brought King to those steps was partly designed to pressure President John F. Kennedy, who had introduced civil rights legislation in June 1963. King and other leaders deliberately agreed to keep their speeches measured, avoiding the kind of confrontation that had defined the movement elsewhere. King had been assigned the sixteenth speaking slot out of eighteen. The day was tightly managed. And yet something unscripted happened, urged on by a gospel singer sitting a few feet behind him, that would become the moment Americans most remember.

• 2. Years in the Making

  ›

  King had been preaching about dreams since at least 1960, when he addressed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in a speech called "The Negro and the American Dream." That speech named white supremacists and the federal government alike as forces that had, in his words, "scarred the dream through its apathy and hypocrisy." He even suggested that the Negro might be "God's instrument to save the soul of America."

  By 1961, the language of "the dream" had become the organizing image of several of King's national speeches. Then, on the 27th of November 1962, he delivered a version of the address at Booker T. Washington High School in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. That speech was actually longer than what he would give at the Lincoln Memorial, and large sections of the text were nearly identical, including the "I have a dream" refrain. The recording was lost to public knowledge for decades, eventually rediscovered in 2015 and restored by the English department of North Carolina State University.

  In June 1963, King delivered another version with the same refrain before 25,000 people at Detroit's Cobo Hall, just after the 125,000-strong Great Walk to Freedom on June 23. Walter Reuther had given him an office at Solidarity House, the United Auto Workers headquarters in Detroit, where King worked directly on the Washington speech. A recording of that Cobo Hall address was later released by Detroit's Gordy Records as an LP called The Great March To Freedom.

• 3. Twelve Hours Before

  ›

  King drafted the Washington speech with the help of Stanley Levison and Clarence Benjamin Jones, working in Riverdale, New York City. Jones later recalled that the logistical demands of organizing the march were so consuming that the speech itself was an afterthought. On the evening of Tuesday, August 27, just twelve hours before King was to speak, he still did not know exactly what he was going to say.

  The speech had no single definitive draft. It was built from several different versions written at different times, and it had originally been titled "Normalcy, Never Again." A draft carrying that title is held today in the Morehouse College Martin Luther King Jr. Collection at the Robert W. Woodruff Library in Atlanta. Almost none of the "Normalcy" material survived into the final address. The idea of framing constitutional rights as an "unfulfilled promise" came directly from Clarence Jones. King incorporated it, along with phrases from Samuel Francis Smith's hymn "America (My Country, 'Tis of Thee)" and allusions drawn from the Bible, including the book of Amos.

• 4. The Improvised Peroration

  ›

  Mahalia Jackson had sung "How I Got Over" at the march just before King stepped to the podium. She knew about the Detroit speech and the power of the dream refrain. As King moved toward the end of his prepared remarks, Jackson called out from her seat behind him: "Tell 'em about the dream, Martin!"

  King departed from his written text. What followed was not rehearsed. Historian Taylor Branch records that King later said he reached for the "first run of oratory" that came to him, unsure whether Jackson's words had even registered consciously. The phrase "I have a dream" was then repeated eight times as King described an integrated, unified America. Other repeated phrases carried the cadence forward: "One hundred years later," "We can never be satisfied," "With this faith," "Let freedom ring," and "free at last." Historian Jon Meacham later wrote that with a single phrase, King joined Jefferson and Lincoln among the figures who shaped modern America.

  The speech drew its rhetorical architecture from techniques with deep roots in African-American preaching. Scholars describe one of those techniques as "voice merging" - the weaving together of previous preachers, scripture, and the speaker's own words into a distinct unified voice. A second technique is the prophetic voice, which speaks with urgency on behalf of a community and calls it back to duty. King's address can also be read as what scholars call a "dynamic spectacle," defined by the charged context of the civil rights movement and the march itself.

• 5. Document and Allusion

  ›

  King opened by invoking the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, saying that "one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free." He echoed Lincoln's Gettysburg Address directly, opening with "Five score years ago" to mirror Lincoln's "Four score and seven years ago." He framed America's founding promises as a "promissory note" on which the country had defaulted, saying that "America has given the Negro people a bad check" but that marchers had come to Washington to "cash this check."

  The speech also contains a veiled reference to the Ku Klux Klan. King's call to "let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia" pointed to a peak near Atlanta that had served as a gathering place for Klan members in the early 20th century. In the 1920s, owners of the mountain who were members themselves had the Confederate president Jefferson Davis and generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson engraved onto its face as a memorial.

  The final passage draws on Galatians 3:28 and also quietly echoes the opening lines of Shakespeare's Richard III, where "the winter of our discontent" becomes in King's version "this sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent" that will not pass until "there is an invigorating autumn." The speech's closing refrain, invoking "America (My Country, 'Tis of Thee)," closely parallels the ending of Archibald Carey Jr.'s address to the 1952 Republican National Convention, which also ended with that hymn and named several of the same mountains.

• 6. Immediate Aftermath

  ›

  James Reston wrote in The New York Times that King had "touched all the themes of the day, only better than anybody else," describing him as "both militant and sad." Reston noted the event was better covered by television and the press than any Washington occasion since President Kennedy's own inauguration. The march concluded without a single arrest related to the demonstration.

  President Kennedy watched King's speech on television and was impressed. He invited march leaders to the White House afterward, and he felt the day had strengthened the prospects for his civil rights legislation. The Federal Bureau of Investigation read the day very differently. Two days after the speech, William C. Sullivan, the head of COINTELPRO, wrote an internal memo concluding that King "stands head and shoulders above all other Negro leaders" in his ability to influence large numbers of people and should be marked as "the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation." The FBI expanded its COINTELPRO operation against King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference as a direct result.

  Not all Black leaders celebrated. Malcolm X, writing in his 1965 autobiography, dismissed the march and its most famous moment, asking: "Who ever heard of angry revolutionaries swinging their bare feet together with their oppressor in lily pad pools, with gospels and guitars and 'I have a dream' speeches?"

• 7. The Original Manuscript

  ›

  As King finished speaking and turned to leave the podium, a young man named George Raveling asked for the original typewritten manuscript. Raveling was volunteering as a security guard that day and was also a star college basketball player for the Villanova Wildcats. King handed it to him on the spot.

  Raveling kept the document for decades. He was offered $3 million for it and declined every time. In 2021, he chose to give custody of the manuscript to Villanova University, the institution from which he had graduated in 1960. The document was then loaned to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., for rotational display as part of a long-term arrangement.

  The speech's copyright status generated its own legal dispute. Because the address was broadcast widely on radio and television, a question arose about whether that broadcast constituted a "general publication" that would have placed it in the public domain. In 1999, the case Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Inc. v. CBS, Inc. established that the King estate held copyright and had standing to sue. The parties settled. Under current law, the speech will remain under copyright in the United States until 2038, which is 70 years after King's death.

• 8. Enduring Presence

  ›

  Following King's assassination in 1968, Gordy Records released the speech as a single, and it reached number 88 on the Billboard Hot 100. The full text did not appear in print until 1983, fifteen years after his death, when The Washington Post published a transcript.

  In 2002, the Library of Congress added the speech to the National Recording Registry. The following year, the National Park Service placed an inscribed marble pedestal at the Lincoln Memorial to mark the exact location where King had stood. The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, dedicated in 2011 near the Potomac Basin, centers its design on a line from the speech: "Out of a mountain of despair, a stone of hope." A 30-foot-high relief sculpture named the Stone of Hope stands at its heart, with two large granite pieces representing the mountain of despair split apart on either side.

  On the 28th of August 2013, thousands gathered on the National Mall to mark the 50th anniversary. Former Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter were there, along with President Barack Obama. In 2021, Time partnered with Epic Games to build an interactive exhibit inside the game Fortnite Creative on the speech's 58th anniversary. And in 2016, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew announced that the back of the US $5 bill, which had long shown the Lincoln Memorial, would be redesigned to include an image from King's speech among the historical events depicted there.