August 28, 1963
Delivered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C, the "I Have a Dream" speech of Martin Luther King, Jr. demanding an end to racial segregation and discrimination, is widely recognized as one of history's most powerful orations
Broadcast live on television and radio, King called upon America to make good on its promise "that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
The famous words "I have a dream" came near the end of the speech as King poetically describes his vision of a world where "little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers."
Clarence B. Jones was on the speaker's platform with Martin Luther King, Jr. that day. As a speechwriter, counsel and friend to King, he witnessed the improbable event unfold. In his memoir, "Behind the Dream: The Making of the Speech that Transformed a Nation," he describes the scene just prior to the keynote address.
A quarter of a million people, human beings who generally had spent their lives treated as something less, stood shoulder to shoulder across that vast lawn, their hearts beating as one – hope on the line when hope was an increasingly scarce resource.
There is no dearth of prose describing the mass of humanity that made its way to the feet of the Great Emancipator that day; no metaphor that has slipped through the cracks waiting to be discovered, dusted off, and injected into the discourse a half century on. The march on Washington has been compared to a tsunami, a shockwave, a wall, a living monument, a human mosaic, an outright miracle.
It was all of those things, and if you saw it with your own eyes, it wasn't hard to write about. With that many people in one place crying out for something so elemental, you don’t have to be Robert Frost to offer some profound eloquence.
