He has MLK “dream” language, without the dream part. Why it's not in there

The draft of MLK’s most famous speech was missing its most famous lines. The “I have a dream” part was suggested by Mahalia Jackson as King neared the end of his speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963.

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

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

One of 20 known copies of the speech sits under glass in the offices of Seth Kaller, a dealer in historical documents and artifacts.

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

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

MLK’s “March” speech: four minutes and full of politics

King’s speech was short, just four minutes long, and full of political themes.

In it, King invoked the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, the Bible and Shakespeare. He began with “Fifty Years Ago,” a reference to the Gettysburg Address marking the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.

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

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

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

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

King urged action — “the great urgency of now” — but urged his followers not to reciprocate the violence they faced. It had been one hell of a summer. Demonstrators were beaten, attacked by police dogs and attacked with powerful shots from fire hoses.

“He’s damn good”

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

People of all faiths and colors, from faith and civil rights groups to labor unions, arrived by car, bus and train. They had come to hear King and—even though they were far from their places of worship—they were willing to be taken to church.

They had heard Marian Anderson sing the national anthem and heard speeches from student leader John L. Lewis and AFL-CIO Chairman Walter Reuther, 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, let alone all three television networks at the same time. With only a single paragraph left in his prepared remarks, King had already begun sending his crowd on its 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 This situation can and will be changed somehow. “, he said. “Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.”

The audience gave him sustained applause. Then King turned to the floating and familiar.

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

Then King deviated from his prepared text and made history.

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

For ten minutes, he captivated the crowd, his oratory elevated to match the moment, telling them how things could be, of black and white children playing together, of his four children who were “not after the “The color of their skin would be judged, but rather by the content of their character.”

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

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 fulcrum was the classic King.

King began with a solid speech, Eig said, but probably not one that would be remembered as one of his best.

“Then he spontaneously decided he wanted to preach and just started preaching. I think he just felt it. He felt the crowd. He felt like he hadn’t moved her.

“His favorite thing was to sit in the pulpit and give a rousing sermon,” Eig said. “He wrote speeches when he wanted to convey a certain type of policy-oriented message. But that sermon was meant to inspire people like 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 making contact with his congregation and when he was not.

“That’s what King did best,” Eig said. “He knew how to read a room and how to inspire people. He read that room – the largest room of his life, 250,000 people – and felt he had to leave them something more inspiring and hopeful.”

He took her to church, to the National Mall in the nation’s capital while the whole world watched.

“He started with this speech that he knew well. He had recited it a few times and I think he knew he could do it without much thought and that he could speak from the heart and that it would just flow. And that was definitely the case,” Eig said.

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

No time limit for Martin Luther King Jr.

Kaller said speakers had strict time constraints that day, but not King, who was told the crowd was there for him and he could take as much time as he wanted. The speech was written to meet the deadline and it was strong, Kaller said, “but it’s not the deepest emotion you see in him” when he turns to the dream.

It is natural to turn to the dream, said Kaller. King had it in his back pocket.

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

King spoke only once on record about the pivot 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 an interview King gave in November 1963 to Donald Smith, a graduate student in rhetoric.

“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 reaction was wonderful that day, you know – and suddenly this. “ I thought of a thing that I used – I had used it a lot, this “I have a dream” thing – and I just felt like I wanted to use it here. I don’t know why, I hadn’t thought about it before the speech.”

The MLK Speech is a “founding document,” like a Declaration or a Constitution

Kaller, who keeps two copies of the speech for clients of his documents and artifacts company in White Plains, said he considers the speech to be on par with the works King relied on.

“What excites me about this is that he’s taking the Declaration, the Constitution, the Emancipation Proclamation and keeping that and the great idea of America alive,” Kaller said.

“This, like these other documents, is a founding document of American history, for – in our founding as a continuing work in progress to create a more perfect union – we will always be founded.” The works were not in 1787 and neither not done in 1963, but he certainly pushed it forward.”

Even if The Dream didn’t make the mimeograph.

Peter D. Kramer has been an employee for 36 years and writes detailed stories on various topics. His story looking back at the Oak Street Fire in Yonkers won a national Headliner Award for Outstanding News Special/Feature Column. Reach him at [email protected].

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He has MLK “dream” language, without the dream part. Why it’s not in there

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