Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Last Five Minutes of his “I Have a Dream” Speech, a PROPHET’S CRESCENDO, is the Main STAR of the 1963 March on Washington

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Last Five Minutes of his “I Have a Dream” Speech, a PROPHET’S CRESCENDO, is the Main STAR of the 1963 March on Washington

Daniel Whyte III, President of Gospel Light Society International, says Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a modern-day God-called Prophet in the truest sense of the word for “Such a Time as This.”

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The last part of the speech took less time to deliver than it takes to boil an egg, but “I Have A Dream” is one of American history’s most famous orations and most inspiring.

On Aug. 28, 1963, from the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, Martin Luther King Jr. began by speaking of poverty, segregation and discrimination and how the United States had reneged on its promise of equality for Black Americans. If anyone remembers that dystopian beginning, they don’t talk about it.

What is etched into people’s memory is the pastoral flourish that marked the last five minutes and presented a soaring vision of what the nation might be and the freedom that equality for all could bring.

As participants prepare to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, that five-minute piece of King’s 16-minute address is the star of that day and today it is the measuring stick of the country’s progress.

How did that memorable moment come to be? Were there other speakers?

King was one of several prominent figures speaking to the many tens of thousands gathered on the National Mall that summer day. Others included A. Phillip Randolph, the march director and founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; Roy Wilkins, the NAACP’s executive secretary; Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers; and John Lewis, a 23-year-old who led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and later was a longtime congressman.

There were memorable moments before King spoke.

Eleanor Holmes Norton, who today is the District of Columbia’s veteran nonvoting delegate to Congress, was a SNCC member who helped organize the march. She remembers that march leaders got Lewis to tone down his planned speech because of concern it was too inflammatory. “He had phrases in there about, for example, Sherman marching through Georgia,” Norton said, a reference to Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman burning most of Atlanta during the Civil War. “So we had to work with the leaders of the march to change a little bit of that rhetoric.”

King had no peer at the microphone, she said, acknowledging she does not remember now what others may have said. “I’m afraid that Martin Luther King’s speech drowned out everything. It was so eloquent that it kind of surpassed every other speech.”

Did King deliver the speech off the cuff?

The first two-thirds were from written text. The actual speech he used is on loan now at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, in the “Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom” gallery of the museum, and shows where he broke script.

King lieutenant Andrew Young said in an interview that he worked with King preparing the text and “none of the things that we remember were in his speech. They didn’t give him but nine minutes and he was trying to write a nine-minute speech.”

A King biographer, Jonathan Eig, said King hit the end of his written remarks and kept going because “he was Martin Luther King” and “it was time to do what he loved to do best, and that’s to give a sermon.”

Had King talked about a dream before?

Although he set the text aside, his deviation was not extemporaneous in the truest since of the word.

Eight months before the March on Washington, King gave an address in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, with similar themes, including a dream.

In June 1963, King spoke in Detroit and opened with the same recognition of Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation before noting that 100 years later, Black people in the U.S. were not free. He talked of the circumstances and sense of urgency but then moved into what he said was a “dream deeply rooted in the American dream.”

The speech mirrored points he would speak of two months later.

Source: Associated Press