It's 'I have a dream' day - REPOST
It's 'I have a dream' day - REPOST
It's the 28th of August, which means it's the 61st anniversary of Dr Martin Luther King Jr's 'I have a Dream', regularly voted the greatest speech of all time.
Last year, the full speech made it on to YouTube, but it didn’t manage to stay up there. The text is on Speakola for those who want to read along.
I wrote this last year, and thought I’d re-post now.
My favourite podcast is ‘The Rest is History’, and during their recent visit to Washington, Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook sat on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and talked about Dr King’s speech, and it’s an absolute gem:
They are such funny and interesting presenters. At the beginning of many episodes, Tom will perform a speech from history, complete with hammy accent, and it sets the scene and the tone of the show better than any actual audio would.
But with ‘I have a Dream’, there was a blanket ban on Martin Luther King impressions, and wisely too, because in oratory terms, it’s a mountaintop that mortals shouldn’t even attempt to climb.
The episode’s focus on the day itself starts at 26.00, although I’d recommend the set up as well. Some details I didn’t know about the March on Washington:
Marlon Brando was walking around carrying an electric cattle prod, to symbolise police brutality;
People were leaving, it was hot and it had been a long day, when Dr King was ready to speak;
Tom says that the under-card of the previous 15 speakers ‘weren’t that great, people had heard it all before’. I do think that John Lewis was great that day.
‘Fierce urgency of now’ was a call back to Letter from Birmingham jail;
There was debate going on in King’s inner circle about whether he should use the ‘I have a dream’ motif that he had used before. One aide, Wyatt T Walker, said to him, ‘do not use ‘I have a dream’, it’s too trite’.
The night before the speech, Dr King had stayed up till 4am in his room, rehearsing and thinking about the speech. When he retired for the night, he said to aides, ‘I am now going up to my room to counsel with my lord’.
Legends abound about whether Dr King was always going to use the ‘I have a dream’ ending, or whether it was an ad lib. Some version have jazz legend Mahalia Jackson requesting the riff, almost like a fan putting a dime into a jukebox. She was on stage, but the microphones don’t pick up any audio. When we had King scholar Clayborne Carson on Speakola podcast, he didn’t believe Jackson said ‘tell em about the dream’ - that the story is apocryphal.
Dominic also explains that a sneaky candidate for my favourite paragraph in ‘I have a dream’ is borrowed directly from The Book of Isaiah. I always wondered how King found such poetic and idiosyncratic metaphors:
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.
My chat with Dr Carson back in 2021 is a good podcast episode and I highly recommend it. But The Rest of History episode really is a joy. Have a listen!
And of course, have a listen to the speech again, in all its perfection.
What about that ending:
And this will be the day -- this will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning:
My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.
Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim's pride,
From every mountainside, let freedom ring!
And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.
And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.
Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.
Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.
Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.
Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.
But not only that:
Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.
Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.
From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
And when this happens, and when we allow freedom 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!
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