This Day in History: "I Have a Dream" - Democratic Underground

H2O Man

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Thu Aug-28-08 06:39 AM
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This Day in History: "I Have a Dream"

Good morning. Today, on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s historic "I Have a Dream" speech, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at three quotes from books on King’s life. Older DUers will remember that time as one of the highights of the 1960s. Younger folks might find these quotes provide an interesting context to that chapter in our history.

Enjoy this day, and especially Barack Obama’s speech tonight.

{1} "On August 27, the day before the great march, King flew to Washington with Coretta and a retinue of aides and advisers, and to work on his speech in a suite at the Willard Hotel. Because he had been allotted only eight minutes at the rostrum, King’s lieutenants were upset. ‘There’s no way in the world, Martin, that you can say what needs to be said in eight minutes,’ moaned Walter Fauntroy of SCLC’s Washington office. ‘They can’t limit you – the spokesman of the movement – to that.’

" ‘But they’ll be mad at me if I speak longer,’ King said. "I don’t want Roy Wilkins saying I overstepped my bounds and everybody else was true to the time commitment but I had to show off.’ They went round and round about that, until finally King’s aides threw up their hands. ‘Look, Martin,’ Fauntroy said. ‘You go on and do what the Spirit say do.’

"King labored on his speech throughout the night …. Despite the time limit, King wanted to say something meaningful, something Americans would not soon forget.He was to speak last, so his remarks would be the highlight and the benediction, but for millions of people who would be watching on television or listening by radio. …. ‘He intended to echo some of the Lincoln language,’ Coretta said.

"By morning, the speech was finished ….."
--Stephen B. Oates; Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr.; pages 249-250.

{2} "The massive rally was a powerful and joyous scene, with both speeches and musical presentations evoking fervent emotional responses. The program was well along before King’s turn came to speak, and he moved forward carrying his prepared text. ‘I started out reading the speech,’ he recalled in a private interview three months later, and then, ‘just all of a sudden – the audience response was wonderful that day – and all of a sudden this thing came to me that I have used – I’d used it many times before, that thing about "I have a dream" – and I just felt that I wanted to use it here. I don’t know why, I hadn’t thought about it before the speech.’ So he dispensed with the prepared text and went on extemporaneously. He had used the same peroration previously – at a mass meeting in Birmingham in early April, and in a speech at Detroit’s huge civil rights rally in June – but on this warm August afternoon, standing before tens of thousands of people, the words carried an inspirational power greater than many of those present had ever heard before ….

"Dripping with sweat, King stepped back as the audience gave him a thundering ovation. Although he did not know it, the speech had been the rhetorical achievement of a lifetime, the clarion call that conveyed the moral power of the movement’s cause …."
--David J. Garrow; Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; pages 283-284.

{3} "Instead of dwelling on the bitterness of the past or the severe problems of the present he gave the cheering crowd, as well as the millions who watched on television, the vision of a future no one else had defined and few black people could imagine. It wasn’t that Martin disagreed with the grim messages the others had brought to the crowd and to the American people. The dream he envisioned acknowledged the truth of everything that had already been said. He simply looked beyond the injustice and hatred and division to see what America could become. It was a prophecy of pure hope at a time when black people and the nation as a whole needed hope more than anything else."
--Ralph D. Abernathy; And the Walls Came Tumbling Down; page 280.