Video: 'Martin Luther King | I Have A Dream Speech | August 28, 1963, Full Speech'
(Wednesday, August 28, 1963, approximately 3:00 p.m. EDT; during the civil rights movement) — American civil rights activist and Baptist minister Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech today from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
In the speech, King called for civil and economic rights and an end to racism in the United States.
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Delivered to over 250,000 civil rights supporters, the speech was one of the most famous moments of the civil rights movement and among the most iconic speeches in American history.
Beginning with a reference to the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared millions of slaves free in 1863, King said “One hundred years later, the Negro still is not free”.
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Toward the end of the speech, King departed from his prepared text for a partly improvised peroration on the theme “I have a dream,” prompted by Mahalia Jackson’s cry: “Tell them about the dream, Martin!”
In this part of the speech, which most excited the listeners and has now become it’s most famous, King described his dreams of freedom and equality arising from a land of slavery and hatred.
“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!
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The ideas in the speech reflect King’s social experiences of ethnocentric abuse, mistreatment, and exploitation of black people.
The speech draws upon appeals to America’s myths as a nation founded to provide freedom and justice to all people, and then reinforces and transcends those secular mythologies by placing them within a spiritual context by arguing that racial justice is also in accord with God’s will. Thus, the rhetoric of the speech provides redemption to America for its racial sins.
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King describes the promises made by America as a “promissory note” on which America has defaulted. He says that “America has given the Negro people a bad check”, but that “we’ve come to cash this check” by marching in Washington, D.C.
He concluded the speech by saying:
When we allow freedom to 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!”
