How Martin Luther King Jr. Wrote 'I Have A Dream'

Words are powerful, and Martin Luther King Jr. was an absolute master of this medium.



Transcript:

''I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.''

            Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech is arguably the most important and most well-known speech of the 20th century. It's 1667 words and 17 minutes long, absolutely riddled with big difficult terms and full of rhetorical devices that are intentional and practiced. The speech as everyone knows was delivered at the march on Washington in 1963 and voiced the economic, political, and moral message of civil rights to a quarter million people in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

Onto those people and the billions who have seen or heard it since, King's words imprinted an image of what black Americans were fighting for and why, fully 100 years after Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation.

''Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation.''

            The very first line of the speech is already doing so much. The first four words are an allusion to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, an instantly recognisable piece of American rhetoric that, in one fell swoop, links America's founding, which Lincoln spoke of, and the Civil War, when he spoke, with the fight for civil rights. Throughout the speech King takes great pains to make links like this. It's important for him to frame civil rights as a chapter in the larger American mythology so that those who identify with that mythology might incorporate this struggle into that story.

''...the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.''

            But there's even more to see in this first line. One of the things that make King's words so memorable is their musicality. Here he uses alliteration, starting with the letter ''S'', that draw you along the sentence. Like a tune that's catchy, alliteration helps the phrase stick in the mind, and King returns to it again and again in his speech.

''...dark and desolate valley...''

''This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent.''

''The marvellous new militancy ...''

''...out of great trials and tribulations.''

''...dignity and discipline...''

''In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check.''

            This isn't the only rhythmically aware or musical feature of I Have a Dream. There's another rhetorical device called ''anaphora'' which King uses even more than alliteration. Anaphora is the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive sentences, something that in writing would be redundant but in speech is an effective tool for emphasis. In I Have a Dream, Martin Luther King uses anaphora as an emphasising tool but also as an organising device. Listen to how these phrases sketch the larger ideas of the speech almost like an outline:

''But one hundred years later...

''One hundred years later...''

''One hundred years later...''

''One hundred years later...''

''One hundred years later...''

''...but we refuse to believe...''

''...we refuse to believe...''

''Now is the time...''

''Now is the time...''

''Now is the time...''

''Now is the time...''

''We can never be satisfied...''

''We can never be satisfied...''

''We cannot be satisfied...''

''We can never be satisfied...''

''I have a dream...''

''I have a dream...''

''I have a dream...''

''I have a dream...''

''I have a dream today...''

''Let freedom ring...''

''Let freedom ring...''

''Let freedom ring...''

''Let freedom ring...''

''Let freedom ring...''

            The speech goes from the past, to the present, to the future of civil rights, and is threaded with a refusal to settle for anything other than the ideal of freedom and equality. I think this is a key to Martin Luther King's rhetorical genius. Drawing from his gospel roots, he not only uses alliteration and anaphora, even allusion, for dramatic effect but also to help the audience grasp the structure and remember the nuance of his message. King knows that, for example, you may not know this line from Shakespeare - ''Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York'' - but the phrase will ring familiar.

''This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.''

            King shifts the seasons, of course, because for those who live in the American South autumn is more relieving than summer (know your audience).  And sticking with this paragraph for just a moment, notice that this sentence of Shakespearean poetry is couched in a point about urgency and not settling. King isn't all flowery language; he draws that image of paradise then follows it with a sentence that contains three easy-to-understand clichés:

"Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual.''

            This mixing of plain and ornate language is, I think, a microcosm of what occurs in the entire speech. After alluding to the Gettysburg Address in the Declaration of Independence, King compares the promises of those documents to ''a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds'.'' After invoking the plain realities of police brutality, ''for whites only'' signs, and voter suppression, he paraphrases the Bible:

''We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.''

            The first half of the speech describes in large part the issue at hand, what is to be done and demanded,  what is to be avoided, and he tells those who have suffered to hold fast and believe; while the final part, which was famously improvised by King on the spot, rises into the heights of dreams and ideas:

''I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, ''and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.''

            In my video analysing Donald Trump's speech, I talked about how he was able to connect with people by using simple language.  It's a good general rule for public speaking when you're addressing a large, diverse audience - the most important part of rhetoric is being understood. Trump does this by keeping his words basic and emotional, and it works! But I think Martin Luther King offers a counterexample of public speaking, one that's more complex and layered in language and structure but still just as easily understandable as anything that current politicians or speakers say. In I Have a Dream, the simple language contextualises and grounds the poetic, and the poetic elevates and animates the simple. That's why it echoes across time, and will echo for decades and ages to come, something vital and live.

''We will be able to speed up that day when ALL of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

'Free at last! Free at last!

Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'''