KING'S "I HAVE A DREAM" SPEECH:

August 28, 1963

On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., the African American
civil rights movement reaches its high-water mark when Martin Luther King, Jr.,
speaks to more than 200,000 people attending the March on Washington. The
demonstrators--black and white, poor and rich--came together in the nation's
capital to demand voting rights and equal opportunity for African Americans and
to appeal for an end to racial segregation and discrimination.The peaceful rally
was the largest assembly for a redress of grievances that the capital had ever
seen, and King was the last speaker. With the statue of Abraham Lincoln--the
Great Emancipator--towering behind him, King evoked the rhetorical talents he
had developed as a Baptist preacher to articulate how the "Negro is still not
free." He told of the struggle ahead, stressing the importance of continued
action and nonviolent protest. Coming to the end of his prepared text (which,
like other speakers that day, he had limited to seven minutes), he was
overwhelmed by the moment and launched into an improvised sermon.He told the
hushed crowd, "Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to Georgia,
go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettoes of our northern cities,
knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed." Continuing, he
began the refrain that made the speech one of the best known in U.S. history,
second only to Lincoln's 1863 "Gettysburg Address":"I have a dream," he boomed
over the crowd stretching from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument,
"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."King had used the "I have a dream" theme before, in a handful of
stump speeches, but never with the force and effectiveness of that hot August
day in Washington. He equated the civil rights movement with the highest and
noblest ideals of the American tradition, and for many Americans--white and
black--the importance of racial equality was seen with a new and blinding
clarity. He ended his stirring, 16-minute speech with his vision of the fruit of
racial harmony:"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!'"In the year after the March on Washington, the civil rights
movement achieved two of its greatest successes: the ratification of the 24th
Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished the poll tax and thus a barrier
to poor African American voters in the South; and the passage of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited racial discrimination in employment and
education and outlawed racial segregation in public facilities. In October 1964,
Martin Luther King, Jr., was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. On April 4, 1968, he
was shot to death while standing on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee--he
was 39 years old. The gunman was escaped convict James Earl Ray.