By most accounts it was not his greatest speech. Indeed, he had actually started to wind it up without its signature passage when the singer Mahalia Jackson, who stood nearby, encouraged him to go on. When he began to tell the crowd: "Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama," she urged him: "Tell them about your dream Martin. Tell them about the dream."
With encouragement from the audience King went on to draw upon a version of a speech he had made many times before (he had delivered it to insurance executives in Detroit only a week before) which centred on his dream of a society in which race was no longer a boundary to individual opportunity and collective strength.
But on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, with the eyes and the ears of the world upon him, the substance of the words rose to the symbolism of the occasion. In a nation apprehensive about its global status in a decade that would see its attempts to assert its military and political hegemony rebuffed, the speech was a precision strike. Starting with Lincoln and ending with "a dream rooted in the American dream" it challenged segregation but left almost everything else that white Americans held dear intact.
Not surprisingly blacks and whites understood both the speech and the march differently. Eighteen days later, four black girls, changing into their choir robes after Sunday school class, were killed during the fire bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama.
A Newsweek poll shortly afterwards showed that 3% of African-Americans and 74% of whites believed that "Negroes were moving too fast". Given the underlying conditions of racial inequality that prompted the march, it is also not surprising that many of those differences still exist.
| Gary Younge's Guardian UK story-behind-the-story column "I have a dream" goes well with Ben Okri's poem "Children of the dream" and (a week ahead of most tributes) King's speech itself.
posted in articles on August 20, 2003 11:14 PM | t (0)
« Previous phile: London has been the making of them.
» Next phile: Good works and goodwill do leave a strong legacy.
Return to top of page