He has the MLK ‘Dream’ speech, minus the dream part. Why isn’t it in it

On By Littum

game

  • The draft of MLK’s most famous speech was missing his most famous lines. The ‘I Have a Dream’ part was suggested by Mahalia Jackson as King neared the end of his 1963 speech at the Lincoln Memorial.

As the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday approaches, three mimeographed pages in a White Plains office building speak to the man’s genius and the moment for which he is probably best remembered, his “I Have a Dream” speech.

The pages are the advanced text of the speech King gave from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the largest civil rights rally of its time.

One of 20 known copies of the speech is under glass in the offices of Seth Kaller, a dealer in historical documents and artifacts.

This is where the genius comes into play. Nowhere on the pages distributed to the press covering the march do the words “I Have a Dream” appear.

King improvised his most famous lines as he looked out at the 250,000 people he had summoned to Washington on August 28, 1963.

MLK’s ‘March’ speech: four minutes and heavy on politics

King’s speech was designed to be short, just four minutes, heavy on politics.

In it, King invoked the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, the Bible and Shakespeare. He began with “Five score years ago,” an echo of the Gettysburg Address to the date of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.

It had been 100 years since Lincoln freed the slaves, he noted, but “Negro life is still severely crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.”

The civil rights leader’s speech, even without the “Dream,” did what Lincoln had done a century earlier at Gettysburg: It connected to the nation’s founders at a moment of national crisis and urged Americans to live up to their founding principles.

The central idea of ​​King’s speech was that these founding documents were a promissory note due.

“It is clear today that America has defaulted on this promissory note as far as her citizens of color are concerned,” King said. “Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check that has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’

King called for action – “the fierce urgency of now” – but urged his followers not to retaliate against the violence they had been subjected to. It had been a bloody summer. Protesters had been beaten, attacked by police dogs and attacked by powerful streams from fire hoses.

‘He’s damn good’

Yet they had come to the nation’s capital in peace to push for civil and economic rights for blacks, Latinos and other marginalized groups.

People of all faiths and colors, from religious and civil rights groups and labor organizations, had come by car, bus and train. They had come to hear King and – although they were far from their houses of worship – they were ready to be taken to church.

They had heard Marian Anderson sing the national anthem and speeches from student leader John L. Lewis and AFL-CIO President Walter Reuther, from Whiney Young of the National Urban League and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP. Mahalia Jackson had sung.

King had never faced such a large crowd before, not to mention all three television networks simultaneously. With only a single paragraph left in his prepared remarks, King had already begun to send his crowd on their way.

“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,” he said. “Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.”

The crowd gave him a standing ovation. Then King turned to the floating and familiar.

Mahalia Jackson, sitting to King’s left in the crowd, called out, “Tell them about the dream, Martin.”

Then King departed from his prepared text and wrote history.

“I say to you today, my friends, even though we face the difficulties today and tomorrow, I still have a dream,” he began.

For 10 minutes he held the audience rapt, his speech floating to meet the moment, telling them about how things could be, about black children and white children playing together, about his four children who were judged “not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

He did not refer to his text again, but he returned to the last line of those pages, the line he knew by heart, the line that sent 250,000 pilgrims back to their cars, buses and trains satisfied: “Free at last, free at last, thank God , almighty, we are free at last.”

Pulitzer winner Jonathan Eig: MLK ‘knew how to read a room’

Jonathan Eig, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2023 biography, “King: A Life,” said the focal point was classic King.

King had begun with a solid speech, Eig said, but probably not one that would have been remembered as one of his best.

“Then he really decided in an instant that he was going to preach, and he went right into this sermon. I think he just felt it. He felt the crowd. He felt like he hadn’t moved them.

“His favorite place to be was in the pulpit, giving a moving sermon,” Eig said. “Speeches are what he would write when he wanted to deliver a certain kind of policy-oriented message. But this was a sermon to inspire people as he would inspire people in a church, and I think it was just an emotional decision. It felt like the right thing to do at the time.”

The Baptist preacher could tell when he was connected to his congregation and when he wasn’t.

“This is what King did best,” Eig said. “He knew how to read a room and he knew how to inspire people. He read this room – the biggest room of his life, 250,000 people – and he felt he had to leave them with something more inspiring and more hopeful.”

He took them to church on the National Mall in the nation’s capital as the world watched.

“He started this speech that he knew very well. He had given it a few times before and I think he knew that he could do it without much thought and that he could speak from the heart and that it just wanted to float. And it certainly did,” Eig said.

President John F. Kennedy watched the broadcast from the White House, the first time he had seen King speak. Eig’s book quoted the president’s reaction: “He’s damn good.”

No time limit for Martin Luther King Jr.

Kaller said the speakers that day were on strict time limits, but not King, who was told the audience was there for him and he could take as long as he wanted. The speech was written to meet the time limit, and it was powerful, Kaller said, “but it’s not the gut-wrenching feeling you see him get” when he turns to the dream.

Turning to the dream was natural, Kaller said. King had it in his back pocket.

“It was one of the themes he had developed and it was very successful. The night before, at the Willard, people told him, ‘Use the dream. Talk about the dream.’ They knew it was inspiring,” Kaller said.

King spoke only once on the record about the pivot point he made in the dream speech.

In his 2003 book, “The Dream: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Speech that Inspired a Nation,” Drew D. Hansen wrote about a November 1963 interview King gave Donald Smith, a rhetoric graduate student.

“I started reading the speech,” King told Smith, “and I read it down to a point, and all of a sudden I decided—the audience’s response was wonderful that day, you know—and suddenly this Thing came to me, which I’ve used – I’d used it many times before, the ‘I have a dream’ thing – and I just felt like I wanted to use it. I don’t know why, I hadn’t thought about it before the speech.”

MLK’s speech a ‘fundamental document’ like Declaration, Constitution

Kaller, who is guarding two copies of the speech for clients of his White Plains documents and artifacts firm, said he considers the speech in line with the works King invoked.

“What’s so exciting to me about this is that with it he’s taken the Declaration, the Constitution, the Emancipation Proclamation, and he’s keeping it alive and keeping the great idea of ​​America alive,” Kaller said.

“This, as much as the other documents, is a foundational document of American history because—in our founding as an eternal work in progress to bring about a more perfect union—we are always being founded. The work was not done in 1787, and it wasn’t done in 1963, but he certainly pushed it forward.”

Even if the Dream did not do the mimeography.

Peter D. Kramer is a 36-year-old employee who writes long stories on a variety of subjects. His story looking back at the Oak Street fire in Yonkers won a national Headliner Award for Outstanding News Specials/Feature Column. Contact him at [email protected].