“I Have a Dream Speech”: Address to the Civil Rights March on Washington, 28 August 1963. Delivered on the steps at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
“Five score years ago a great American in whose symbolic shadow we stand today signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree is a great beacon of light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity…
But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land…
In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men would be granted the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check… But … we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation…
We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy…
Let us work and march and love and stand tall together until that day has come when we can join hands and sing, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’”
EXCEEDINGLY RARE ADVANCE PRESS COPY of one of the most important speeches in U.S. history..
Martin Luther King., Jr.’s iconic speech was delivered at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. Known as the "I Have a Dream" speech, this advance press copy, (originally entitled “Normalcy - Never Again”) did not include these iconic words.
January 1963 marked the Emancipation Proclamation centennial and should have been cause for celebration. Instead, continued discrimination and marginalization of Black Americans, along with violent attacks on civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama in May of 1963, galvanized civil rights organizers, who began planning a march on the nation's capital calling for equality and the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
Civil rights activists Martin Luther King, Jr. and A. Philip Randolph determined that the March would be held in August, while Congress was in session. Bayard Rustin, an experienced strategist and political organizer, coordinated the March. They planned the event in a Harlem office building during the summer of 1963, and dedicated volunteers and civil rights organizations across the country worked to make the March a reality.
At around 8 p.m., on August 27, 1963, the night before the march, Dr. King met with his inner circle in the lobby of the Willard Hotel, in Washington D.C., to draft his speech, which was scheduled to be five minutes. They worked in the hotel lobby because it would be harder to wiretap than a suite. By 10 p.m., advisors Stanley Levison, Clarence Jones and Wyatt Walker began to draft the speech based on King’s notes. Walker suggested King not use any of the “dream” rhetoric, which he had used many times before in lesser-known speeches, calling it “trite” and “cliché” (Younge, The Speech: The Story Behind Martin Luther King’s Dream). By midnight, King took the working draft up to his hotel room for final edits. At 4 a.m. he handed the three-page speech to his Press Office, and by 7 a.m. his staff had finished making mimeographed copies for use in press kits.
President Kennedy, concerned that the March might lead to violence, asked for it to end at the Lincoln Memorial, rather than outside the U.S. Capitol, where members of congress might feel under siege. The Lincoln Memorial was a fitting nod to the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. Before delivering one of the most important and best-known speeches in American history, King told an advisor that he wanted to deliver a “sort of a Gettysburg Address” (Younge, ibid.). The speech he delivered invoked the Gettysburg Address, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, Shakespeare and the Bible.
The March drew 250,000 people, the largest crowd of demonstrators the country had ever seen. King spoke last. As he started his delivery, he kept to the script, frequently glancing down at the advance text. As he neared the end of the written text, Mahalia Jackson, a gospel singer and close friend, who had performed right before King, shouted to him: “Tell ‘em about the dream, Martin” (Gates, “Did MLK Improvise in the ‘Dream’ Speech?”). At that moment, King put aside the advance text and launched into the “dream” sermon. His speech lasted 17 minutes, 12 minutes longer than the advance press copy. Thus, any copy that contains the “dream” section cannot be considered a genuine first printing.
Watching the speech live on television, President John F. Kennedy, himself an accomplished orator, inspired by King’s passionate and fiery delivery, exclaimed, "He’s damn good" (Branch, 886).
The day after the March, in the New York Times, James Reston wrote: “Dr. King touched all the themes of the day, only better than anybody else. He was full of the symbolism of Lincoln and Gandhi, and the cadences of the Bible. He was both militant and sad, and he sent the crowd away feeling that the long journey had been worthwhile” (Reston, “‘I Have a Dream …’”).
Both the prepared advance press copy and the as-delivered 17 minute version of the speech convey a powerful message: America had failed to live up to the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. On that day in 1963 Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded the nation of its obligation to live out the true meaning of its creed — “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
As King noted in his speech, there was “no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.” After the 1963 March on Washington, King and other civil rights leaders were invited to the White House to meet with President Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson. They discussed the need for bipartisan support of civil rights legislation. The March, along with increased racial violence in Birmingham in the fall of 1963, led the Kennedy administration to pursue a robust federal civil rights bill in Congress.
In 1964, King became the youngest man ever to earn the Nobel Peace Prize. The provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 reflected the demands of the March and provided hope that “now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.”
The copy we are offering is one of the very few surviving copies of the original speech mimeographs, run-off by the March’s Press Office between 04:00 and 07:00 AM on 28 August 1963.
KING, JR., MARTIN LUTHER. “Advanced Text of Speech to be Delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. President, Southern Christian Leadership Conference March on Washington. August 28, 1963.” Original mimeograph, run-off by the March’s Press Office between 04:00 and 07:00 on 28 August 1963. 8.5 x 14 in (216 x 356 mm), three single-sided mimeograph leaves, typeset in blue ink. Some mild toning to extreme edges, indication of a staple removed on top right corner of each leaf; otherwise fine, no tears or creasing with text entirely clear. Elegantly framed (showing each page) above a series of photographs of the March to an overall size of 27x34 inches.
SCARCE: We are aware of only a handful of copies either in institutions or in private collections.
References:
Taylor Branch. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63. Simon & Schuster, 1988.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “Did MLK Improvise in the “Dream” Speech?,” PBS.org, 2013.
Drew D. Hansen. The Dream: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Speech that Inspired a Nation. HarperCollins, 2003.
James Reston. “‘I Have a Dream…’: Peroration by Dr. King Sums Up a Day the Capital Will Remember,” New York Times, 29 August 1963.
Gary Younge. The Speech: The Story Behind Martin Luther King’s Dream. Guardian Books, 2013.
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