Today honors Dr. Martin Luther King for his role in protecting the civil rights of every American. His genius was in understanding his audience. When he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, DC in August 1963, he knew that his primary audience was white Americans and his objective in the speech was to make civil rights palatable to those who refused to grant equal rights to black Americans.
The speech came in two parts. The first was written out and he followed the script, laying out how the idea of equal rights was the bedrock of the Constitution even though the actual text of the Constitution institutionalized slavery. It is a careful and patient outline of how the black population has been denied civil rights by segregation and Jim Crow laws. This part of the speech was to make universal civil rights consistent with the values and ideals of the United States. Because it was written out, the first part of the speech relied upon logic and evidence and suffered from the typical flaws of a speech that was read and not delivered.
The second part was not written out but was a speech that he had often given to black Americans and it begins about 10 minutes in the video below. This part of the speech demonstrated the power of the spoken word and the full meaning of rhetoric. Mahalia Jackson, a gospel singer and close associate of King, encouraged him to leave off the logic and to rely upon the emotions that flow from a sense of liberation. She gave King the license to treat white America to the true feelings of black Americans:
“The story that has been told since that day has Mahalia Jackson intervening at a critical junction when she decided King’s speech needed a course-correction. Recalling a theme she had heard him use in earlier speeches, Jackson said out loud to Martin Luther King Jr., from behind the podium on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, “Tell them about the dream, Martin.” And at that moment, as can be seen in films of the speech, Dr. King leaves his prepared notes behind to improvise the entire next section of his speech—the historic section that famously begins “And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream….”
The result was one of the most powerful speeches in American history and a genuine turning point in the fight for civil rights. And the speech led to the Civil Rights Act of 1965 which laid the foundation for a more substantive understanding of what rights are. Those rights have since been extended to the rights of women and the gay community. More work needs to be done enhancing the rights of transgender individuals, disabled people, immigrants, and refugees. But King made these developments possible, and Americans should be grateful to King, and all those who supported him, for leading the way.
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