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Click to listenMartin Luther King (1929–1968)
I Have a Dream—speech delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Washington DC on 28 August 1963
Registered copy, final page
Licence granted by IPM, Atlanta, Georgia as manager of the King Estate.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress

 

I Have a Dream—speech by Martin Luther King
1963

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Library of Congress
Washington DC
United States

Martin Luther King Jr (1929–1968) was a Baptist preacher who became a national leader. For a brief historical moment, around the time he delivered this speech in August 1963, it seemed as though he embodied the American Civil Rights movement.

Earlier in 1963 King had delivered the most decisive civil rights breakthrough since the American Civil War. It began with a campaign in Birmingham, Alabama—a town then so thoroughly segregated that blacks were forbidden by law from so much as walking through the white section at the front of a bus in order to sit in the 'coloured' section at the back. King began a campaign of civil disobedience against such laws on 2 April, assisted by 65 volunteers; by early May, his crusade was attracting 1000 new recruits a day, and making front-page news around the world. In June President Kennedy drafted a civil rights bill designed to override Alabama's segregation laws and all others like them.

King regarded the march on Washington on 28 August—the largest demonstration in American history—primarily as a means of pressuring Congress into passing Kennedy's bill. Others saw it as an expression of solidarity—or of anger. King was speaking not only to the crowd before him, but also to fellow campaigners of differing opinions; to others around the United States who, although allies, considered him too mild and conciliatory in his views; and to his enemies, who considered him a dangerous radical. Part of King's genius lay in the way he managed to speak, without subterfuge, to all these people simultaneously.