martin luther king i have a dream speech

#Martin luther king i have a dream speech how to#

“One of the things King knew at that time is that no matter how compelling the case was on its merits for ending racial segregation, there was no way in hell that African Americans would be able to impose that point of view on the white American majority.

The powerful use of the phrase ‘I have a dream’ was a summons to the conscience of America,” Jones says. It was a call to the moral conscience of America. That question is: what kind of country are we? The speech was a call to the soul of America. “I think was giving an answer to a rhetorical question addressed collectively to the nation. Jones believes that intensity came from the challenge of asking America to live up to its ideals just four months after the nation had been confronted with horrifying photographs and television footage of African-American adults and children being faced down with police dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham, Ala. “The speech was, in its content, not a profound analysis or commentary, but it’s the way he spoke and the intensity of how he felt.”

Oh my God, something had taken over his body.

King speak many times in churches throughout the country, but there was something kind of mystical. Franklin, Aretha Franklin’s father, helped organize, and “it did not evoke any kind of special response,” says Jones, who went on to write the book Behind the Dream : The Making of the Speech that Transformed a Nation. King had even used the phrase “I Have a Dream,” just a couple months earlier in Detroit at a rally for freedom that Reverend C.L. It wasn’t the precise wording that was new.

#Martin luther king i have a dream speech how to#

Step Into History: Learn how to experience the 1963 March on Washington in virtual reality The day unleashed a side of King that Jones had never seen before. I saw Martin start to rub his right foot on the lower part of his left leg, and I said to someone who was standing next to me, ‘These people out there, they don’t know it, but they’re about ready to go to church.'” When Baptist preachers get particularly moved, many of them have a habit of taking their right foot as they’re standing and rubbing it up and down the lower part of their left leg. “He took the written text that he had been reading from and moved it to the left side of the lectern, grabbed both hands of the lectern, and looked out to the thousands of people out there, and that’s when he started speaking extemporaneously. King’s back was to me as he was speaking, but I could hear and see him,” Jones tells TIME. “What most people don’t know is that she shouted to him as he was speaking, ‘Martin! Tell them about the dream! Martin, tell them about the dream!’ I was there. So it’s not a surprise that after she performed “How I Got Over” and “I’ve Been ‘Buked and I’ve Been Scorned” at the march, she stuck close by through what would turn out to be one of his most important speeches. “He would lean back, close his eyes, and tears would run down his face as she would sing to him.” “When he would get very down and depressed, he would ask his secretary Dora McDonald to get Mahalia on the phone,” he says. She was one of his most trusted advisors - and an informal therapist of sorts, as Jones frames it. Some credit goes to the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, King’s former legal counsel Clarence B.