{"id":69712,"date":"2013-08-28T15:00:51","date_gmt":"2013-08-28T19:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=69712"},"modified":"2013-08-28T15:00:51","modified_gmt":"2013-08-28T19:00:51","slug":"fifty-years-the-lasting-power-of-dr-kings-dream-speech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/daily-astrology\/fifty-years-the-lasting-power-of-dr-kings-dream-speech\/","title":{"rendered":"Fifty Years: The Lasting Power of Dr. King\u2019s Dream Speech"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Crowds
Crowds gathering at the Lincoln Memorial for the March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963. Photo: James H. Wallace\/The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture
<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nBy Michiko Kakutani for The New York Times<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

It was late in the day and hot, and after a long march and an afternoon of speeches about federal legislation, unemployment and racial and social justice, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. finally stepped to the lectern, in front of the Lincoln Memorial, to address the crowd of 250,000 gathered on the National Mall. <\/p>\n

He began slowly, with magisterial gravity, talking about what it was to be black in America in 1963 and the \u201cshameful condition\u201d of race relations a hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Unlike many of the day\u2019s previous speakers, he did not talk about particular bills before Congress or the marchers\u2019 demands. Instead, he situated the civil rights movement within the broader landscape of history \u2014 time past, present and future \u2014 and within the timeless vistas of Scripture.<\/p>\n

Dr. King was about halfway through his prepared speech when Mahalia Jackson \u2014 who earlier that day had delivered a stirring rendition of the spiritual \u201cI Been \u2019Buked and I Been Scorned\u201d \u2014 shouted out to him from the speakers\u2019 stand: \u201cTell \u2019em about the \u2018Dream,\u2019 Martin, tell \u2019em about the \u2018Dream\u2019!\u201d She was referring to a riff he had delivered on earlier occasions, and Dr. King pushed the text of his remarks to the side and began an extraordinary improvisation on the dream theme that would become one of the most recognizable refrains in the world.<\/p>\n


\nWith his improvised riff, Dr. King took a leap into history, jumping from prose to poetry, from the podium to the pulpit. His voice arced into an emotional crescendo as he turned from a sobering assessment of current social injustices to a radiant vision of hope \u2014 of what America could be. \u201cI have a dream,\u201d he declared, \u201cmy 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!\u201d<\/p>\n

Many in the crowd that afternoon, 50 years ago on Wednesday, had taken buses and trains from around the country. Many wore hats and their Sunday best \u2014 \u201cPeople then,\u201d the civil rights leader John Lewis would recall, \u201cwhen they went out for a protest, they dressed up\u201d \u2014 and the Red Cross was passing out ice cubes to help alleviate the sweltering August heat. But if people were tired after a long day, they were absolutely electrified by Dr. King. There was reverent silence when he began speaking, and when he started to talk about his dream, they called out, \u201cAmen,\u201d and, \u201cPreach, Dr. King, preach,\u201d offering, in the words of his adviser Clarence B. Jones, \u201cevery version of the encouragements you would hear in a Baptist church multiplied by tens of thousands.\u201d<\/p>\n

You could feel \u201cthe passion of the people flowing up to him,\u201d James Baldwin, a skeptic of that day\u2019s March on Washington, later wrote, and in that moment, \u201cit almost seemed that we stood on a height, and could see our inheritance; perhaps we could make the kingdom real.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr. King\u2019s speech was not only the heart and emotional cornerstone of the March on Washington, but also a testament to the transformative powers of one man and the magic of his words. Fifty years later, it is a speech that can still move people to tears. Fifty years later, its most famous lines are recited by schoolchildren and sampled by musicians. Fifty years later, the four words \u201cI have a dream\u201d have become shorthand for Dr. King\u2019s commitment to freedom, social justice and nonviolence, inspiring activists from Tiananmen Square to Soweto, Eastern Europe to the West Bank.<\/p>\n

Why does Dr. King\u2019s \u201cDream\u201d speech exert such a potent hold on people around the world and across the generations? Part of its resonance resides in Dr. King\u2019s moral imagination. Part of it resides in his masterly oratory and gift for connecting with his audience \u2014 be they on the Mall that day in the sun or watching the speech on television or, decades later, viewing it online. And part of it resides in his ability, developed over a lifetime, to convey the urgency of his arguments through language richly layered with biblical and historical meanings.<\/p>\n

The son, grandson and great-grandson of Baptist ministers, Dr. King was comfortable with the black church\u2019s oral tradition, and he knew how to read his audience and react to it; he would often work jazzlike improvisations around favorite sermonic riffs \u2014 like the \u201cdream\u201d sequence \u2014 cutting and pasting his own words and those of others. At the same time, the sonorous cadences and ringing, metaphor-rich language of the King James Bible came instinctively to him. Quotations from the Bible, along with its vivid imagery, suffused his writings, and he used them to put the sufferings of African-Americans in the context of Scripture \u2014 to give black audience members encouragement and hope, and white ones a visceral sense of identification. <\/p>\n

Continue reading here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Michiko Kakutani for The New York Times It was late in the day and hot, and after a long march and an afternoon of speeches about federal legislation, unemployment and racial and social justice, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. finally stepped to the lectern, in front of the Lincoln Memorial, to address … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7221,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69712"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7221"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69712\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}