"Tell them about the dream, Martin"

Today is a special holiday in America - we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr whose birthday was on January 15, 1929 (the official holiday is celebrated on the third Monday of January each year).  I usually honor Dr. King by reading one of his best known speeches, the "I Have a Dream Speech: (see the transcript here).  He gave this speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. on August 28, 1963 during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom to over 250,000 civil rights activists and leaders.  

The speech was ranked as top American speech of the 20th century in 1999 poll of scholars.  Sean O'Grady wrote in The Independent that the speech has "a strong claim to be the greatest in the English language of all time." The writer and historian Jon Meacham said, "With a single phrase, King joined Jefferson and Lincoln in the ranks of men who've shaped modern America." 

I've read the speech many times over the years, but I only recently learned about the actual events around the speech itself.  While there are many versions of early drafts of the speech circulating around, there is apparently not a single draft of the speech that he actually delivered that day.  Dr. King apparently put together passages from several of his older speeches, and the speech was originally entitled, "Normalcy, Never Again."  Apparently (and I learned this from reading Adam Grant's book, Originals over the winter break), Dr. King was working on the speech the night before he was supposed to deliver it.  Clarence Benjamin Jones once said, "Martin still didn't know what he was going to say."

The immortal phrase, "I have a dream" may not have even been planned.  Apparently, the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson shouted to Dr. King from the crowd toward the end of his speech, "Tell them about the dream, Martin."  Dr. King departed from his prepared speech and improvised the most famous passages that we remember to this day:

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. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

His speech is a masterpiece of oratory and rhetoric.  Dr. King tied together the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, the Emancipation Proclamation, and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.  The late US Representative John Lewis, who also spoke that day as the president of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, "Dr. King had the power, the ability, and the capacity to transform those steps on the Lincoln Memorial into a monumental area that will forever be recognized. By speaking the way he did, he educated, he inspired, he informed not just the people there, but people throughout America and unborn generations."

It was and is an amazing speech delivered by an amazing man.  Today, on a day when we celebrate the man, the idea, and the dream, let us remember that it is not just Dr. King's dream, but all of ours too.  Let us remember that we have work that remains.  Let us remember that while we have made progress, we still have a long way to go.