Two days later, at a decisive planning meeting, Wilkins expressed worries about any assemblage that might feature a ‘tinge of Harlem,’ but the NAACP grudgingly agreed to endorse a one-day Washington event on Wednesday, August 28. Yet other civil rights supporters remained extremely worried about the March; African-American Congressman Charles C. Diggs Jr., of Detroit, warned King that in Washington there was increasing concern about ‘disciplinary problems’ at such a demonstration, and that the announcement of the August 28 date had made ‘a lot of people nervous.’

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In early July, the March organizers announced that no sit-ins or civil disobedience would be part of the August 28 gathering, and worries about what would occur began to recede. On July 17, President Kennedy, choosing to embrace the inevitable, publicly endorsed the March, and administration officials quietly began assisting March planners in innumerable ways. King, echoing Randolph’s original theme, told journalists the March would ‘arouse the conscience of the nation over the economic plight of the Negro,’ but the Urban League’s Whitney Young voiced the new consensus that had resulted from Kennedy’s metamorphosis: The March would be ‘an all-inclusive demonstration of our belief in the President’s program.’

As August 28 drew close, planners agreed on an afternoon rally at the Lincoln Memorial where speeches by March leaders would be interspersed among musical performances by noted entertainers. King would speak last, and four days before the March he told Al Duckett, a black journalist who was ghostwriting a forthcoming King book on the Birmingham campaign (eventually titled Why We Can’t Wait), that his August 28 oration needed to be’sort of a Gettysburg Address.’

But given how hectically frantic King’s daily schedule usually was, only in the early morning hours of August 28 itself did King finish his final revisions on an advance text of a speech. When typed out and mimeographed for advance distribution to the press, it came to less than three legal-size, double-spaced pages. Yet for King to produce any sort of an advance text for a speech was almost unprecedented, since whether at civil rights rallies or in Sunday morning church sermons, Martin Luther King Jr. almost always spoke extemporaneously, often with no outline or notes whatsoever in front of him. As Drew Hansen writes in his new book The Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Speech That Inspired a Nation, ‘King did not so much write most of his speeches as assemble them, by rearranging and adapting material he had used many times before,’ material that King the preacher knew by heart.

After master of ceremonies A. Philip Randolph introduced King as ‘the moral leader of our nation,’ King addressed the huge late afternoon crowd of more than 250,000. He began by commending his listeners for joining ‘what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.’ Then King began to make his way through his advance text almost verbatim, making reference to Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and to the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, promises that remained unfulfilled for black Americans, King noted. Speaking metaphorically, King compared those promises to a ‘bad check’ that the United States should now make good on. Using one of his favorite rhetorical devices, an anaphora featuring the recurring phrase ‘Now is the time,’ King called for America to live up to those promises. He made no direct reference to Congress or to Kennedy’s pending civil rights bill, but he did identify discriminatory evils that federal legislation could eliminate. After quoting the prophet Amos on justice and righteousness, King was close to the end of his prepared text. He later recalled that moment:

I started out reading the speech, and I read it down to a point, and just all of a sudden, I decided — the audience response was wonderful that day, you know — and all of a sudden this thing came to me that I have used — I’d used it many times before, that thing about ‘I have a dream’ — and I just felt that I wanted to use it here. I don’t know why, I hadn’t thought about it before the speech.

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