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I Have a Dream

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Martin Luther King, Jr. delivering his speech at the DC Civil Rights March.
For other uses, see I Have a Dream (disambiguation).

"I Have a Dream" is the popular name for the most famous public speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., when he spoke powerfully and eloquently of his desire for a future where blacks and whites would coexist harmoniously and as equals. King's delivery of the speech on August 28, 1963 from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was a defining moment of the American Civil Rights Movement. The speech is often considered to be one of the greatest speeches in history and was ranked the number 1 speech of the 20th century by Rhetoric scholars. [1]

Style

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 Widely hailed as a masterpiece of rhetoric, King's speech resembles the style of a black Baptist sermon. It appeals to such iconic and widely-respected sources as the Bible and invokes the United States Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the United States Constitution. Through the rhetorical device of allusion (defined by Campbell and Huxman (2003) as "indirect references to our shared cultural knowledge, such as the Bible, Greek and Roman mythology, or our history"), King makes use of phrases and language from important cultural texts for his own rhetorical purposes.

Early in his speech King alludes to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address by saying "Five score years ago..." Biblical allusions are also prevalant. For example, King alludes to Psalm 30:5 [2] in the second stanza of the speech. He says in reference to the abolition of slavery articulated in the Emancipation Proclamation, "It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity." Another example Biblical allusion is found in King's tenth stanza: "No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." This is an allusion to Amos 5:24 [3] Parallelism, or "using the same initial wording in a sequence of statements or phrases in order to add emphasis, order, and climax to an idea" (Campbell & Huxman, 2002, p. 177), is a rhetorical tool employed throughout the speech. An example of parallelism is found early as King urges his audience to seize the moment: "Now is the time..." is repeated four times in the sixth stanza. The most widely cited example of parallelism is found in the oft quoted phrase "I have a dream..." which is repeated eight times as King paints a picture of an integrated and unified America for his audience.

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