The Speech: The Story Behind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Dream (Updated Edition)

By Gary Younge

Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his powerful I Have a Dream speech on August 28, 1963. Sixty years later, the speech endures as a defining moment in the civil rights movement and remains a beacon in the ongoing struggle for racial equality.

This gripping book tells the story behind The Speech and sheds light on other key moments of the March on Washington, drawing on interviews with Clarence Jones, a close friend of and draft speechwriter for Martin Luther King Jr.; Joan Baez, who sang at the march; as well as Angela Davis and other leading civil rights luminaries.

Now with a new introduction to mark the 60th anniversary of that historic day in Washington, The Speech offers an essential analysis of Kings words at a moment of urgent reckoning and renewed calls for justice and liberation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Release date: Aug 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781642599626

Gary Younge

Gary Younge is a journalist, author and broadcaster. He is editor-at-large for The Guardian. His latest book is Another Day in the Death of America (Guardian Faber Publishing, 2017).

Book preview

Preface to the 2023 Edition

There was an Anodyne quality to the rally on the Washington Mall in 2013, held to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington—the same milestone for which this book was originally published. With three presidents and the attorney general speaking from the Lincoln Memorial, this moment of mass protest had been so sanctified, historically misrepresented, and co-opted into liberal mythology that it was a challenge to connect the official celebration with the radical event they were celebrating.

But the seeds of revolt that would push possibilities of antiracist intervention beyond the limits claimed through a Black presidency had been sown even then. Just a month earlier, George Zimmerman had been acquitted in the murder of Trayvon Martin, whose face was emblazoned on many T-shirts that day. The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter was coined following that verdict but was not yet in widespread circulation. Almost exactly a year later, Michael Brown was shot dead by a police officer in Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis, and #BlackLivesMatter entered the popular consciousness, primarily as a slogan. Brown’s killer was also acquitted. Indeed, Black people were executed by the American state with such brutal predictability over the following years that the hashtag never lost its relevance.

Donald Trump’s election intensified and amplified that relevance, emboldening bigots in and out of uniform to act on their prejudices. On the morning of May 25, 2020, a white woman in New York City’s Central Park who did not want to put her dog on a leash threatened a Black male birdwatcher who had asked her to obey the park’s regulations: I’m going to call the cops and tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life, she said—and then followed through on her promise. Later that day, the police were called to a Minneapolis convenience store after a Black man paid for a packet of cigarettes with a suspected fake twenty dollar bill. Twenty minutes later, after the police had handcuffed him, thrown him to the ground, and kneeled on his neck for a full eight minutes, he was dead.

George Floyd’s murder sparked a sustained period of antiracist protest and rebellion that pollinated not just across the United States but throughout the world. As we approach the sixtieth anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous speech, it is useful to reflect on what the last ten years have taught us about modern protest, the possibilities it conjures, and the weaknesses it reveals in comparison to the series of events that made the March on Washington both possible and necessary.

The march on washington was effectively forced on the national civil rights leadership after the escalation of militant defiance in Birmingham, the spirit of which spread like a wildfire through the country. The all-male leaders of the big four—Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Congress of Racial Equality, the Urban League, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—spent the year running to catch up with the mood on the ground in Birmingham. The Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee, which was closer to the grassroots, failed to see the potential of the march, considering it an empty gesture. Only the union leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, A. Philip Randolph, was truly primed to embrace its potential significance.

The campaign in Birmingham had been a strategic, coordinated response to particular local circumstances, with each day planned accordingly. So was the national march itself. From a rundown former church on West 130th and Lennox, the veteran activist Bayard Rustin wrote lists, held meetings, and planned the necessary number of toilets, first-aid stations, blankets, and parking spaces. The word went out to labor unions, progressive Catholic organizations, and Black churches across the country, which chartered buses and trains and galvanized their members.

Building the kind of coalition necessary to ensure the success of the march was not easy. It required the organizing work of long-standing institutions that had credibility among their respective bases. The aims of the march had to be clear and the demands focused. Each organization was accountable to its own constituents and fought for compromises in the march’s message, diluting its radicalism. For better and for worse, this was what it took to engineer such a decisive intervention.

Fast-forward more than half a century, and we see very different dynamics at play, thanks primarily to new technology in general and social media in particular. It is worth going back to the messy genesis of #BlackLivesMatter to gain a fuller picture. Alicia Garza, a domestic workers’ rights organizer, was shocked by the mixture of cynicism and respectability politics on her Facebook feed following the acquittal of George Zimmerman in 2013. She penned A Love Letter to Black People and in her final post wrote: Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter. Her close friend, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, an anti–police violence organizer in Los Angeles, responded to the post writing, #BlackLivesMatter. Their friend Opal Tometi, an immigration rights worker in Phoenix, Arizona, contributed her support.

The work these women were doing prior to this moment—campaigning for domestic workers and immigrant rights and against police violence—gives a clear sense of what a phrase like Black Lives Matter has been able to achieve. A range of local antiracist and activist movements, of various infrastructural capacities, already doing work on the ground, rallied together in that moment under the banner #BlackLivesMattter. This was then replicated in cities around the country. They were not formally brought together by a small group of leaders for a definite purpose, like the March on Washington movement, but found each other (or already knew each other) and saw their work as logically connected.

As such, it makes more sense to think of Black Lives Matter as a floating signifier than a unified movement. Like the March on Washington movement, Black Lives Matter involved the engagement of a range of pre-existing movements. But there was no one making lists, crafting coalitions, or negotiating compromises. While certain networks, like the Movement for Black Lives, came to the fore, there was no centralized body coordinating events or core demands that endured. What emerged, instead, is a forever shifting constellation of bodies, drawn to a pixelated broad front opposing and highlighting police violence, for and in a moment. There is nothing wrong with this. In fact, there are benefits.

The gatekeeper role played by the main civil rights organizations in the sixties could be toxic. All men, at one point they wanted to exclude Rustin from the March on Washington because he was a gay ex-communist who had been a conscientious objector during the Second World War and had pled guilty to sex perversion after having been caught, a decade earlier, with two men in a car. They were also slow to pick up on the popular mood because they were weighing the energy emanating from the grassroots against their access to the Kennedy administration.

The more chaotic, less filtered effect of social media has allowed a far broader and more diverse range of voices to emerge, particularly from women and queer activists. With significantly less institutional restraint, people can respond quickly and with complete local autonomy. The lack of formal structure or leadership means they do not have to wait for a big-shot to sign off on a protest or swoop in to give the actions credibility. They can adapt their demands to the place and the time, rather than be hog-tied by resolutions that may not apply or take orders from a person who does not understand the specific local conditions.

This is, I believe, what has allowed Black Lives Matter to travel so freely across the globe, enabling the struggle to adapt to the local climate. In Belgium, they defaced the statues of King Leopold; in the Netherlands, the conversation turned to Santa Claus’s racist sidekick, Zwaarte Piet; in Britain, the statue of slave-trader Edward Colston was thrown in the harbor; in France, attention focused on deaths in police custody.

But there’s a downside, too. The absence of structures, decision-making processes, and clear leadership often also means a lack of democracy, clear direction, consistency, or permanence. People come together for and in a moment under a banner. But then when that moment has passed, they are gone. The organizations on the ground, doing their specific work, still exist. But Black Lives Matter does not, at least not as a national mass movement. Ad hoc social media groups have formed that bear its name, but, with no quality control or ideological coherence, it is difficult to keep track of their relevance or efficacy. This has left this movement prone to the whims and frailties of individuals, self-appointed spokespeople, and social media personalities, all connected digitally but not necessarily politically.

The civil rights organizations of the sixties may have been hierarchical, male-dominated, socially conservative, and in many ways undemocratic. But between them they provided space for strategic debate and a network that could nurture, incubate, organize, sustain, and channel resistance.

This is not a complaint about how great things were or how bad things are. It is simply a description of the opportunities and challenges that have been thrown up in this period, compared those that existed in 1963. In the ten years since this book first came out, there has been a significant rise in racial consciousness. Issues of racial justice have a greater sense of urgency and saliency among the mainstream than they have for decades. In the year after George Floyd’s murder, more than 30 states passed more than 140 new police oversight and reform laws.

But there has also, predictably, been a severe backlash. White and Republican support for Black Lives Matter is now below what it was before Floyd’s murder. Disenfranchising Black people is at the heart of the Republican agenda for regaining electoral power. It is too often forgotten that January 6, 2021, started with the election of a Democrat, Raphael Warnock, as the first Black senator of Georgia, a state that has seen a 28 percent increase in minorities over the previous two decades and where Black turnout soared. The putsch attempted later that day, when far-right Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, illustrated among other things the most desperate effort to thwart an electoral process in which Republicans could no longer command a majority, even in the cradle of the Confederacy.

But with a majority on the courts, including the Supreme Court, as well as in many gerrymandered state legislatures, the far right still has the power to roll back many of the advances of the civil rights era and block progressive change.

The past decade has revealed, in a way that could not have been imagined on the fiftieth anniversary of the speech, the capacity for mass mobilizations against systemic racism among a new generation. It has shown movements’ ability to shift public consciousness and galvanize large numbers. It has not, however, been able to produce the structures, institutions, or processes that can steer that energy and strategically focus that resistance. It is one of the contradictions of this period that we have lost old political ground even as we have cleared new political space. If the last ten years have shown us anything, it’s that, far from being a settled chapter in America’s liberal mythology, the legacy of the civil rights era remains fiercely contested.

Introduction

Lightning in a Bottle

The night before the March on Washington in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. asked his aides for advice about the speech he was due to make the next day. Don’t use the lines about ‘I have a dream,’ Wyatt Tee Walker told him. It’s trite, it’s cliché. You’ve used it too many times already.

King had indeed employed the refrain several times before. It had featured in an address just a week earlier at a National Insurance Association fundraiser in Chicago and a few months before that at a huge rally in Detroit. Like most of his speeches, both had been well received. But neither had been regarded as particularly momentous.

While King, by this time, was a national political figure, relatively few outside the Black church and the civil rights movement had heard him give a full speech. With all three television networks offering live coverage of the March for Jobs and Freedom (the biggest event of its kind in the country’s history), this would be his introduction to the nation. He wanted a speech to fit the occasion.

Sitting in the lobby of Washington’s Willard Hotel, King called on his team for ideas. Walker’s was one contribution of many. Suggestions just tumbled out, recalled Clarence Jones, who wrote the final draft. ‘I think you should . . .’ ‘Why don’t we . . .’ ‘Martin, as I mentioned before . . .’

After a few hours King thanked them for their input. I am now going upstairs to my room to counsel with my Lord, he said. I will see you all tomorrow. When one of his advisers went to his room later that night, he had crossed out some words three or four times. King went to sleep at around 4 a.m.

A few hours later the march’s organizer, Bayard Rustin, wandered onto the Mall with some of his assistants to find security personnel and journalists outnumbering demonstrators. That morning a television news reporter in DC announced: Not many people seem to be showing up. It doesn’t look as if it’s going to be very much. The movement had high hopes for a large turnout and had originally set a goal of 100,000. From the reservations on coaches and trains alone, they guessed they should be at least close to that figure. But when the actual morning came, that did little to calm their nerves. Reporters badgered Rustin about the ramifications for both the event and the movement if the crowd turned out to be smaller than anticipated. Rustin, forever theatrical, took a round pocket watch from his trousers and some paper from his jacket. Examining first the paper and then the watch, he turned to the reporters and said: Everything is right on schedule. The piece of paper was blank.

As the morning progressed, the organizers’ apprehension subsided as the capital was transformed by protesters flooding in from all over the country. The first official Freedom Train arrived at Washington’s Union Station from Pittsburgh at 8:02, records Charles Euchner in Nobody Turn Me Around: A People’s History of the 1963 March on Washington. Soon trains were pulling in every five to ten minutes. At the height of the flow, ten thousand people came through the station in twenty minutes while one hundred buses an hour rolled through the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel. By 10 a.m. the magnitude of the march was beyond doubt.

We were surrounded by a moving sea of humanity, wrote John Lewis, a young civil rights leader who addressed the crowd that day, as the throng began to move. "Tens of thousands of people just pouring out of Union Station, filling Constitution Avenue from curb to curb. It was truly awesome, the most incredible thing I’d ever seen in my life. I remember thinking, There goes America."

Singers, including Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Josh White, Odetta, and Peter, Paul and Mary kept the crowds entertained. Marchers who brought their own placards made a wide variety of demands and statements. Horses have their own television shows. Dogs have their own television shows. Why Can’t Negroes have their own shows? read one. No US Dough to help Jim Crow Grow, announced another. Yet another read: Our Body in Motion, Our Life on the Line, We Demand Freedom of Mind.

§ § §

Rustin had limited the speakers that day to just five minutes each and threatened to come on with a crook and haul them from the podium when their time was up. But