Tuesday, August 28, 2012

I Have a Dream

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Forty-nine years ago today - August 28, 1963 -- Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "I have a dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to a crowd of nearly a quarter of a million people.

"The three major television networks were to provide live television coverage of the speech, so King had carefully prepared a formal text. In an interview a few months after giving the speech, he recalled he was so moved by the emotion of the crowd spread out before him on that August afternoon in the nation’s capital that he abandoned the prepared text and began to preach from the heart, using the phrase, 'I have a dream.'

In one of the speech’s most memorable passages, King said, 'I have a dream that 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.'

His words conveyed, to a television audience of millions, the moral power of the great crusade for civil rights in the 1960’s. No longer could the country ignore the injustices of poverty, segregation, and violence against African Americans in the United States. King’s eloquent plea for justice and freedom was one of the decade’s shining moments; however, it also served as a powerful reminder that much still needed to be done."

Exerpts taken from Frey, Raymond. "“I Have a Dream” Speech." The Sixties in America. Ed. Carl Singleton. 3 vols. Salem Press, 1999. Salem History Web. 27 Aug. 2012. Library database accessible from off campus.

Full text of King's "I have a dream" speech


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