Page 58 - All About History - Issue 12-14

“I have a dream”

what you need
to know about

the language
of the speech
Dr Catherine Brown, convenor and
senior lecturer in English, New College “ In a heartbeat, King had done away
of the Humanities
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make their long journeys home. A state-of-the-art be satisfied…” he announces, boldly declaring that
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sound system had been brought in for the day, “America has given the Negro people a bad check.”
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but an act of sabotage before the event meant that Jones, watching King captivate the crowd,
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even with help from the US Army Signal Corps in breathed a sigh of relief. “A pleasant shock
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fixing it, some of the crowd struggled to hear the came over me as I realised that he seemed to
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speakers. But King was a man who had endured be essentially reciting those suggested opening
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death threats, bomb scares, multiple arrests, prison paragraphs I had scrawled down the night before in
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sentences and constant intimidation in his pursuit my hotel room”, he reveals in Behind the Dream.
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for equality; he would not be undermined by However, something unprecedented and
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unfortunate circumstance. unscripted then happened. During a brief pause,
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Placing his typed yet scrawl-covered notes gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, who had performed
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on the lectern, King began to speak, deftly earlier in the day, shouted “Tell ‘em about the
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and passionately, invoking the Declaration of dream, Martin!” King then pushed his notes to one
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Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation side and stood tall in front of his audience. Jones,
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and the US Constitution. Early on, he made a nod sensing what was about to happen, told the person
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toward Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address next to him, “These people out there today don’t
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(“Five score years ago…”), an equally iconic speech know it yet, but they’re about to go to church.”
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that 100 years previously set down the then- In a heartbeat, King had done away with his
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president’s vision for human equality. King used formal address and began to preach from his heart
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rhythmic language, religious metaphor and the his vision, his dream, which came to represent a
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repetition of a phrase at the beginning of each legacy that would change civil rights forever. “I
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sentence: “One hundred years later…” he cries, have a dream”, he said, in one of the speech’s most
highlighting Lincoln’s failed dream. “We cannot famous lines, “that my four little children will one
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