PED 1 Document: I HAVE A DREAM This document is the transcription of the speech that Martin Luther King addressed

on August 28, 1963 to more than 200,000 people during the demonstration for "Jobs and Freedom" known as "March on Washington". It was organized in the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and the march begun at the Washington Monument and the assembly point was in front of the Lincoln Memorial where the speeches were delivered.

Martin Luther King's speech was the most famous part of this March and it is considered one of the most important symbols of the civil rights movement but, in fact, the idea of a 1963 March on Washington was not originally Martin Luther King's. It was Philip Randolph, a trade union activist and the senior statesman among African-American civil rights leaders who first suggested the idea. Randolph, indeed, had prepared a massive march to protest segregation in the armed forces and employment discrimination in the war industry in 1941. Eventually, President Roosevelt reacted in front of the threat of Black mobilization and the Fair Employment Act, which outlawed racial discrimination in the national defence industry was passed and the march didn't take place. Despite civil rights movement of the 1950's and 1960's and the laws that federal government passed against racial discrimination, segregation, particularly in the South, was a way of life: Blacks lived in isolated tenements because white landlords refused rent houses to them; Blacks had little access to good jobs and usually worked in service to white employers; Black children attended separate, inferior schools, Southern Blacks were denied the use of public rest-rooms and drinking fountains marked with "For Whites Only"; Blacks were relegated to the back of buses and trains, ...and worse, they were denied the right to participate in political process.

Martin experienced the South under Jim Crow1. He was born January 15, 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia. His father was a Baptist minister and his mother a schoolteacher. He attended segregate public schools and entered Morehouse College in 1944 and spent three years at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania where he became acquainted with Mohandas Gandhi's philosophy of non-violence. He earned a bachelor of divinity degree in 1951. Then, in 1954, Martin Luther King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, A.L. He became a prominent leader in the civil African-American civil rights and was on the executive of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. His led the first great Negro non-violent demonstration in the United States, the Montgomery bus boycott in December 1955, which lasted 382 days. During the boycott, King was arrested, his home bombed and he was subjected to personal abuse. In the spring of 1963 Martin Luther King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) begun the "Birmingham Campaign" to protest for the segregation of Birmingham's downtown merchants and to demand new job opportunities. The Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene "Bull" Connor ordered a brutal response. Birmingham policemen and firemen used snarling German shepherds and high-powered fire hoses against black marchers. Martin Luther King was arrested and jailed and he wrote his famous "Letter From Birmingham City Jail" which advocated civil disobedience against unjust laws.

The international distribution of these violent scenes and the King's claim for civil disobedience resulted in a Kennedy administration response to the crisis. In June 11 Kennedy announced on television a new civil rights bill to place before Congress as a moral issue, "old as the scriptures and clear as the American Constitution" In Kennedy's words. The same day, SCLC leaders announced plans to demonstrate in Washington for new civil rights legislation and King, Randolph and Rustin (Randolph close aide) joined forces to organize the march. On June 22nd, President Kennedy meets the civil rights leaders at the White House pretending them to call off the march. These attendants were: A. Philip Randolph, Jim Farmer (CORE2), Dr. King (SCLC), John Lewis (SNCC3), , Roy Wilkens (NAACP4) and Whitney Young (Urban League), who the press dubbed the "Big Six". The Big Six refused to cancel the march and it's said that after the meeting Kennedy told his aides "Well, if we can stop it, we'll run the damn thing".
1 "Jim Crow was the name of the racial caste system which operated primarily, but not exclusively in the southern and border states, between 1877 and the mid-1960" Museum of Racist Memorabilia, Ferris State University "What was Jim Crow". 2 CORE stands for "Congress of Racial Equality" 3 SNCC stands for "Student Nonviolent Coordinatig Committee 4 NAACP stands for "National Association for the Advancement of Colored People)

The Kennedys felt the march as a political threat and though they publicly supported the march, in fact they wanted to control and limit it. To reduce the number of Blacks protesting in the streets of Washington, they demanded that the day of the march should be a working day and they required that all the marchers arrived in the morning and were gone from the city by dark. They feared to the presence of placards or banners critical of the administration and only officially approved ones could be carried. The Kennedy administration, the press and the white establishment were obsessed by fears of loots and violence on the streets of Washington. Some newspapers stated: "The general feeling is that the vandals are coming to sack Rome" 5, "One small disturbance could set off a wave of mob violence"6, "The deep concern of husbands and bosses for the safety of their wives and secretaries was expressed from one end of the city to the another"7. A "State of Emergency" was declared: All liquor stores and bars closed, Federal employers didn't have to go to the office, store owners removed merchandise to put in safer place, hospitals were prepared for mass riot casualties, baseball games were cancelled, etc. The entire DC police force was mobilized, 4,000 Army soldiers armed with rifles and bayonets and 15,000 paratroopers were placed on alert. Eventually, the heavy police presence resulted not necessary because the March was civilized and peaceful. A quarter of million people marched from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial in a civil protest that became a celebration. The event include musical performances by Marian Anderson, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mahalia Jackson, etc. and the speakers included all of the Big Six civil-rights leaders. What they demanded? The March for Jobs and Freedom wanted to denounce the economic subordination of the American Negro and to achieve economic justice creating more jobs for all Americans. African-American civil-rights movement had demanded for so many times the end of segregation in education, housing, transportation, public accommodations, etc. but they thought that all of this civil rights were of limited extent and duration if economic racial inequality persisted.

5 Appered in Washington Daily News 6 Appered in Business Week 7 Appeared in San Francisco Chronicle

The speech This document has two separate parts attending to how it was made. Although the Dr. King's address in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom is famous as the "I have the dream" speech, in fact, the dream section is not part of his original speech. Martin Luther explained that when he neared to the end of his seven minutes of prepared and written text, he "felt" that he wanted to use this sentence which he had used many times before to close and resume his address. King didn't need to write his speeches. King, as a preacher, addressed to his audience by heart. He began making reference to Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation (very clever, as I've told before, they were in front of the Lincoln Memorial) and to the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and denounced that they remained unfulfilled for Blacks one hundred years after8. He compared metaphorically those promises to a "bad check" that the American government should make good right now. There are lots of metaphors in this text and frequently used to remark contrasting concepts. For example, he contrasts images of "dark and desolate valley of segregation with "sunlight path of racial justice". He contrasts the "joyous daybreak" to the "long night of captivity"; "lonely island of poverty" vs "vast ocean of material prosperity"; and one more, he compares "this sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent" vs "an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality". To emphasize the urgency of a political solution to these injustices, he repeated the phrase "Now is the time..." several times. This repetition of sentences or words is a rhetorical device called anaphora that King uses again and again in this text. Examples of key expressions repeated are: "One hundred years later", "Now is the time...", "We must...", "We can never be satisfied...", "Go back to...", or the most famous "I have a dream". And examples of the key words repeated are: freedom (twenty times!), we/our/you, nation/America/American, justice/injustice, etc. That focus our attention in the main idea of the speech: Black people are not free; the segregation has existed despite the Constitution and the emancipation act and American people (black and whites) have the moral duty to apply justice right Now. King addressed alone to the massive audience that day, but he quoted famous and credible people like Lincoln (as I said above) and made allusions to Biblical passages in order to improve his credibility like in the sentences "It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity", "Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred" Another oratorical device used for King in the speech to be close to his audience and to illustrate his arguments is the use of geographic references. In this speech, the word Mississippi is mentioned in four occasions and also are mentioned Alabama, Georgia, New York, Pennsylvania, etc. There are also other geographic references more generic: "slums and ghettos of our northern cities", "the South", "From every mountainside"... In conclusion, Martin Luther King Jr. was a remarkable preacher, a magician of the oratorical art and to enjoy completely this speech and to feel the strongest emotions, I recommend everybody not only to read, but to listen it9.
8 King uses the old expression "five score years ago"."Score" comes from the Old Norse (extinct Germanic language of medieval Scandinavia and Iceland from about to 700 to 1350) "skor" meaning a notch or tally on a stick used for counting. Often people counted in 20s for large numbers (ex sheep). Then "score" mean 20. 9 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbUtL_0vAJk

SOURCES CONSULTED

http://www.america.gov/st/pubs-english/2003/August/20050711151842pssnikwad0.3846247.html "Martin Luther King Jr.: The man, The March, The Dream", David J. Garrow, August 2003 issue of American History Magazine Speech Analysis: I have a Dream Martin Luther King Jr. By Andrew Dlugan, Jan 18th, 2009, Six Minutes http://sixminutes.dlugan.com/speech-analysis-dream-martin-luther-king/ http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow , Ferris State University, Jim Crow, Museum of racist memorabilia http://www.crmvet.org/ Civil Rights Movement Veterans http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Civil_Rights_Movement_(1955%E2%80%931968)