He began slowly, with magisterial gravity, talking about what it was to be black in America in 1963 and the "shameful condition" of race relations a hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Unlike many of the day's previous speakers, he did not talk about particular bills before Congress or the marchers' demands. Instead, he situated the civil rights movement within the broader landscape of history — time past, present and future — and within the timeless vistas of Scripture.
Dr. King was about halfway through his prepared speech when Mahalia Jackson — who earlier that day had delivered a stirring rendition of the spiritual "I Been 'Buked and I Been Scorned" — shouted out to him from the speakers' stand: "Tell 'em about the 'Dream,' Martin, tell 'em about the 'Dream'!" She was referring to a riff he had delivered on earlier occasions, and Dr. King pushed the text of his remarks to the side and began an extraordinary improvisation on the dream theme that would become one of the most recognizable refrains in the world.
With his improvised riff, Dr. King took a leap into history, jumping from prose to poetry, from the podium to the pulpit. His voice arced into an emotional crescendo as he turned from a sobering assessment of current social injustices to a radiant vision of hope — of what America could be. "I have a dream," he declared, "my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!"
Many in the crowd that afternoon, 50 years ago on Wednesday, had taken buses and trains from around the country. Many wore hats and their Sunday best — "People then," the civil rights leader John Lewis would recall, "when they went out for a protest, they dressed up" — and the Red Cross was passing out ice cubes to help alleviate the sweltering August heat. But if people were tired after a long day, they were absolutely electrified by Dr. King. There was reverent silence when he began speaking, and when he started to talk about his dream, they called out, "Amen," and, "Preach, Dr. King, preach," offering, in the words of his adviser Clarence B. Jones, "every version of the encouragements you would hear in a Baptist church multiplied by tens of thousands."
You could feel "the passion of the people flowing up to him," James Baldwin, a skeptic of that day's March on Washington, later wrote, and in that moment, "it almost seemed that we stood on a height, and could see our inheritance; perhaps we could make the kingdom real."
Dr. King's speech was not only the heart and emotional cornerstone of the March on Washington, but also a testament to the transformative powers of one man and the magic of his words. Fifty years later, it is a speech that can still move people to tears. Fifty years later, its most famous lines are recited by schoolchildren and sampled by musicians. Fifty years later, the four words "I have a dream" have become shorthand for Dr. King's commitment to freedom, social justice and nonviolence, inspiring activists from Tiananmen Square to Soweto, Eastern Europe to the West Bank.
Why does Dr. King's "Dream" speech exert such a potent hold on people around the world and across the generations? Part of its resonance resides in Dr. King's moral imagination. Part of it resides in his masterly oratory and gift for connecting with his audience — be they on the Mall that day in the sun or watching the speech on television or, decades later, viewing it online. And part of it resides in his ability, developed over a lifetime, to convey the urgency of his arguments through language richly layered with biblical and historical meanings.
The son, grandson and great-grandson of Baptist ministers, Dr. King was comfortable with the black church's oral tradition, and he knew how to read his audience and react to it; he would often work jazzlike improvisations around favorite sermonic riffs — like the "dream" sequence — cutting and pasting his own words and those of others. At the same time, the sonorous cadences and ringing, metaphor-rich language of the King James Bible came instinctively to him. Quotations from the Bible, along with its vivid imagery, suffused his writings, and he used them to put the sufferings of African-Americans in the context of Scripture — to give black audience members encouragement and hope, and white ones a visceral sense of identification.
