when did MLK Jr give his i had a dream speech

It was Dr King, the theologian with a PhD from Boston University. It was not just Martin Luther King speaking. King was burnishing his speech with a dash of intellectual gloss. If few of his listeners would have recognized all those names, that did not matter. In the Memphis speech he was mixing the simplicity of a children’s story, a bird’s-eye view of history, with references to lofty historical figures.Īs he imagined the stop in ancient Greece, he spoke of his expectation that he would bump into Pluto, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides and Aristophanes. It was the kind of flair that King employed to infuse his speeches and sermons with dramatic power. They were a rhetorical device to lend emphasis and gravity to his words. The specifics of the trip through time, of course, were not the point of King’s speech. By the end of the speech that he would deliver that night, everyone in Mason Temple would know another reason why he seemed out of sorts.

He had a sore throat and was sleep-deprived. King looked “harried and tired and worn and rushed”, observed one minister. “Every time there was a bang,” Billy Kyles recalled later, “he would flinch.” The shutters clacked shut each time, startling King. Time and again, wind gusts punched open two large window fans near the ceiling of the auditorium. Yet you could say that the storm still had something to say to him. In the words to follow King had nothing more to say about the storm.

But something seemed amiss.Īfter he greeted the audience, he lauded them for braving the storm, coming to the rally, showing that they had the backbone to carry on with the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike. As TV cameramen flooded him with light, his face took on a luminous sheen. Pausing a moment as he stepped to the rostrum, he peered over a welter of microphones.

When did MLK Jr give his i had a dream speech