The ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech that Almost Never Happened
Midway through his speech at the 1963 March on Washington, Martin Luther King, Jr. changed his mind.
The Baptist minister had intended to use his time on the podium to make a level-headed argument for civil rights and an end to segregation.
After all, the event had been given the level-headed title, the ‘March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom’.
And so he thought it best not to preach.
In the first half of his speech, King presented the striking metaphor of a bounced check to show how the country had failed to live up to its promise of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
But, King sensed that his rhetoric was falling flat.
He was the last of a dozen speakers on a sweltering August afternoon, and he noticed that the hundreds of thousands of attendees were getting restless.
That’s when Mahalia Jackson, on stage after performing earlier, shouted, “Tell ’em about the dream!”
Jackson had heard King speak earlier that year in Detroit when he had delivered a rousing oration about his dream of living in an integrated nation.
But he hadn’t included the part about the dream in this speech because it didn’t fit the practical tone of the march.
After he concluded his bit on the promissory note, King paused.
Jackson shouted again, “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin!”
Then, something remarkable happened.
“They’re About to Go to Church”
King took his notes, put them aside, and grasped the lectern with his hands.
Watching wide-eyed, King’s friend and speechwriter Clarence B. Jones turned to the man beside him and said, “These people don’t know it, but they’re about to go to church.”
“His whole body language shifted, became more relaxed,” Jones said. “And I said, ‘This man is going to preach now.’ ”
And that’s exactly what he did.
King looked out to the sea of people and said, “Even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.”
All Americans and lovers of rhetoric know what happened next.
King cycled through several vignettes of his dream that included quotes from the Declaration of Independence and the Bible, and colorful descriptions of scenes from around the country to paint a most vivid picture of his vision.
He spoke some of the most indelible lines in the history of oratory, including perhaps the greatest: “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.”
Without notes, King was speaking from the bottom of his soul. And it absolutely electrified the audience.
As he progressed through the dream section, he became so impassioned that the crowd began to cheer, almost as if it were a call and response with a gospel choir.
By the time that he went into a riff on ‘My Country ‘Tis of Thee’ with the repetition of “Let freedom ring”, King was floating.
He had crescendoed to the point where he was yelling on the last moving sentence of the speech:
“And when this happens, and 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!’ ”
Preaching from the Heart
The ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, as it is known today is widely regarded as one of the greatest speeches ever.
This, despite the fact that it was preachy and unsuitable for the practical purposes of the event, and despite the fact that the title section wasn’t even in his notes.
But, perhaps these seeming deficiencies were what made the speech so powerful.
True, the dream wasn’t in King’s notes, but it was in his heart.
Being able to step away from his script allowed King to channel his fervent passion and crank up his energy.
And the speech was decidedly preachy, but connecting the Declaration with the Bible connected him with everyone listening in a way that would have been impossible if he had simply stayed with the practical address.
Had Mahalia Jackson not prompted King to “Tell ’em about the dream”, it’s possible that the speech wouldn’t have reached the heights that it did.
As it turns out, with the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, it was its outlandishness that made it so good.
