King had indeed used it before — in Albany, Ga., and in Rocky Mount, N.C., in the fall of 1962, and in both Birmingham and in Detroit a few months earlier — but on none of those occasions had it had anywhere near the impact that it did on August 28. ‘I have a dream,’ King began, again introducing an echoing phrase. He quoted from the Declaration of Independence, alluded to the segregationist doctrines of Alabama Governor George C. Wallace, and then reiterated his ‘dream’ that one day even Alabama would achieve interracial harmony. He ended his ‘I have a dream’ repetition by quoting from the Bible’s Book of Isaiah, and then, in his concluding lines, returned to the closing that appeared in his advance text. Adding several lines from a traditional American patriotic song, King expanded on its call to ‘let freedom ring’ from every mountainside by appending some notable Southern mountains to its list of American peaks. He ended with a line he often used as a closing: ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’

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As Drew Hansen notes in The Dream, ‘had King not decided to leave his written text, it is doubtful that his speech at the march would be remembered at all,’ for up until the beginning of his ‘dream’ anaphora, King’s oration had been impressive but not memorable. But once that spontaneous inspiration took hold, King shifted forcefully into his voice as a preacher, rather than just a public speaker, and for the first time a national American audience was exposed to King’s real sermonic power. It was a gift that King had polished in black Southern churches for more than a decade, a gift that movement colleagues had encountered from the onset of the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott forward, but only on August 28 did such a huge crowd, plus a live national television audience, hear the extemporaneous genius that made King such a remarkable preacher.

‘I Have a Dream’ was the signature touchstone of the August 28 March, but the hugely influential success of the March lay in its impressive turnout and in its utterly friendly and easygoing tone, far more so than in King’s address. Ten months later Kennedy’s bill, championed in Congress by the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, was signed into law as the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, and one year after that the other bookend legislative achievement of the Southern civil rights struggle, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, also became law.

But in the years after 1965, the glow of the 1963 March, and of the entire 1963–65 civil rights apex, rapidly receded. King himself quickly sensed the deteriorating political scene, and even in mid-1965 he woefully complained about how ‘often in these past two years I have had to watch my dream transformed into a nightmare.’ That nightmare formulation recurred often in King’s speeches and sermons during 1966 and 1967, and as Drew Hansen rightly observes, ‘between 1963 and 1968, few people spent substantial time talking or thinking about what King had said at the march.’ Indeed, by the time of his assassination on April 4, 1968, King’s speech ‘had nearly vanished from public view.’

Yet the tragedy of King’s assassination quickly returned his 1963 speech to the popular eye. ‘Within a few weeks of King’s death,’ Hansen explains, ‘the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech had regained all the public visibility it had lost since 1963.’ Indeed, it ‘gradually came to dominate public memory of King’s legacy,’ thereby raising the significant danger that its upbeat and optimistic tone would distract most if not all attention from the more radically challenging and harshly critical parts of King’s legacy that were most obvious during his 1967-68 public attacks on American economic inequality and American foreign policy.

But 40 years after the March on Washington, there is no gainsaying that Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’ has entered American public culture as ‘the oratorical equivalent of the Declaration of Independence,’ as Hansen puts it. If its fame threatens to swamp the balance of King’s legacy, and if its stature directs historical memory only toward the brightest and not the bleakest days of the 1960s black freedom movement, it nonetheless remains the most notable oratorical achievement of the 20th century — a’sort of a Gettysburg Address’ indeed.

This article was written by David J. Garrow and originally published in August 2003 issue of American History Magazine. For more great articles be sure to subscribe to American History magazine today!

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