"I Have a Dream" speech Summary

"I Have a Dream" speech Summary 

Summary

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday was first observed as a national holiday in 1986. However, his life had become a fixed part of American mythology for years prior to this. Indeed, to many African Americans whose rights he helped expand, to many other minorities whose lives his victories touched, and to many whites who welcomed the changes his leadership brought, King's life seemed mythological even as he lived it. He is celebrated as a hero not only for the concrete legislation he enabled, but for his articulation of dreams and hopes shared by many during an era of upheaval and change.

After lengthy theological training in the North, King returned to his home region, becoming pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. As a promising newcomer free from the morass of inter-church politics, King became the leader of the Montgomery Bus Boycott when it broke out in 1955. That year-long non-violent protest, which led to a Supreme Court ruling against bus segregation, brought King to the attention of the country as a whole, and led to the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, or SCLC, an alliance of black Southern churches and ministers. This group elected King their president, and began looking for other civil rights battles to fight.

The episodes immediately following met with less success, but nonetheless provided King with the opportunity to refine his protest strategies. Then, in 1963, King and the SCLC joined a campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, to end segregation there and to force downtown businesses to employ blacks. Peaceful protests were met by fire-hoses and attack-dogs wielded by local police. Images of this violence, broadcast on national news, provoked outrage, and this reaction created a political atmosphere in which strong federal civil rights legislation could gain favor and passage, and the next year President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Meanwhile the SCLC, under King, was repeating the tactics of Birmingham in Selma, Alabama, this time for the sake of African American voter registration. Once again, images of the police brutality directed at the protest enabled the passage of federal legislation, this time the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The community of black activists felt that these two major victories marked the limit of what gains could be made politically, and thus after 1965 King began to focus on blacks' economic problems. His strategies and speeches concentrated increasingly on class as well as race, and addressed the United States as a whole. King had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, and this recognition encouraged him to broaden his scope: by the time of his death, he was speaking out virulently against the Vietnam War, and was organizing a Poor People's March on Washington.

When King was assassinated in 1968, the nation shook with the impact. Riots broke out in over one hundred American cities. King was almost immediately sanctified by the white-controlled media, which, however, in its coverage of his accomplishments, also neglected the radicalism of his final three years. Instead his contemporaries focused (as we continue to focus today) on the spirit and the accomplishments of the middle of King's career. For many born after his death, he is known best for the "I Have a Dream" speech, which reflects this spirit, and which he delivered in 1963 at the height of his fame. The federal holiday commemorates this King, who articulated the progressive, human hope of the early 1960s.

Context

With the end of the Civil War in 1865 came the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, declaring slavery illegal and freeing roughly four million African Americans, who had previously been held as property by white Americans. This new, massive, uneducated and unemployed group posed an immediate concern for those in control of the Southern states; but the question of who controlled these states remained up for debate. The federal government officially held control, by keeping Union troops in the South and passing numerous pieces of civil rights legislation (Congress had been unified by the exclusion of Southern representatives). However, many Southern whites resisted Washington's policies by passing discriminatory local laws and forming white supremacy groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan.

For the freed slaves at the center of this conflict, life at first seemed to improve. The first decade after the war, a period known asReconstruction, brought changes suggesting that freedom could lead to prosperity. Strong federal legislation–including various Civil Rights Acts, as well as the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed civil rights for all, and the Fifteenth Amendment, which guaranteed voting rights for blacks–enabled some blacks to win local office, and some to gain economic independence. A number of blacks were even elected to Congress.

In the mid 1870s, however, when Reconstruction ended and federal troops pulled out of the South, white Southerners quickly reversed the progressive changes. Many communities passed "Jim Crow" laws, which segregated public facilities. Some laws forbade black men from marrying white women; others classified blacks not employed by whites as destitute and subject to arrest; others created voting qualifications that kept blacks from the polls. The federal government implicitly affirmed such local statutes when, in 1896, the United States Supreme Court, in the case Plessy v. Ferguson, declared the legality of "separate but equal" services and facilities for African Americans. This ruling, especially in its application to schools, greatly disadvantaged blacks. By the end of the century, people who had slaved by law under white taskmasters now slaved by economic necessity under the system of farming known as sharecropping, in which black farmers exchanged massive portions of their harvests for the right to work a white landowner's property.

The two most prominent African American leaders of this era were Booker T. Washington, a former slave and founder of the Tuskegee Institute, and W.E.B. DuBois, a professor of sociology and reformer, who had graduated from Harvard University. At the 1895 Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, Washington delivered a speech in which he asserted that it was the responsibility of African Americans to improve their own lot, and that blacks could be diligent manual workers first and specialized professions later. Many white people embraced this view of race relations, but its opponents–both black and white– dubbed it the "Atlanta Compromise." DuBois overtly attacked the spirit of Washington's address, advocating faster change. The contrast between these leaders foretokened a similar contrast in the 1960s between pacifistic leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., and militant leaders like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael.

Between the turn of the century and the Great Depression, little changed for most African Americans. Life was characterized by the injustices of second-class citizenship; legal and political inequity represented the least vicious of these–all too commonly they were manifested in lynch mobs and murders. European immigration to the United States increased, and many African Americans resented these newcomers, who gained instantly the rights that were still denied blacks. In 1909 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded, and it went to court to fight for civil rights. The prejudice of the justice system against blacks, however, was clear. In the 1906 Brownsvillecase, African American soldiers, without trial or even evidence, were found guilty of shooting civilian whites, and were dishonorably discharged from the Army. In 1931 nine black men from Scottsboro, Alabama, were similarly convicted, this time of rape, on the unsubstantiated testimony of a few whites. These were just the best known of many unfair trials.

In the face of such injustices, not to mention the injustices of everyday life, some blacks of this era thought the only solution was to separate themselves from white society, either by creating their own organizations, businesses, and services, or by leaving the United States for Africa or the Caribbean. The most famous advocate of the latter proposal was Marcus Garvey, a separatist leader who campaigned in Northern cities.

When the Great Depression hit America in 1929, President Franklin Roosevelt began to implement public policies that benefited people on the margins of society, including African Americans. New Deal legislation, augmented by the successes of the NAACP, improved economic opportunities for blacks; once some blacks gained economic resources and influence, they could more effectively foster groups that protested legal and social inequality. World War IIfurther raised the bar of expectation: abroad, African Americans gave their lives in battles against the racist Hitler; at home, a labor shortage provided industrial jobs for blacks, and led to a mass migration from Southern farms to Northern cities. When the War ended, therefore, and white society tried to resume old forms of discrimination, blacks had seen what life could offer them; they refused to return to their former state of oppression.

Civil rights emerged as a national issue. The landmark ruling of the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas overturned Plessy v. Ferguson,asserting that separate facilities could never be equal. The next major civil rights event was the Montgomery Bus Boycott; which inaugurated Martin Luther King, Jr. as the leader of the Civil Rights Movement. The Movement would dominate the domestic arena of United States politics in the 1950s and most of the 1960s.

Timeline

January 15, 1929: ·Martin Luther King, Jr. is born 

September 20, 1944: ·King enters Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia 

June 1948: ·King graduates from Morehouse College with a Bachelor's Degree in sociology 

September 1948: ·King enters Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania 

June 1951: ·King graduates with a Bachelor's Degree in Divinity studies 

September 1951: ·King enters Boston University 

June 18, 1953: ·King marries Coretta Scott in Marion, Alabama 

May 17, 1954: ·United States Supreme Court rules segregation unconstitutional inBrown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas 

October 31, 1954: ·King becomes pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery Alabama 

June 5, 1955: ·King receives his PhD from Boston University 

November 17, 1955: ·King's first child, Yolanda Denise, is born 

December 1, 1955: ·Rosa Parks is arrested for disobeying segregationist policies on a Montgomery bus 

December 5, 1955: ·Montgomery Bus Boycott begins 

January 30, 1956: ·King's home is bombed 

November 13, 1956: ·United States Supreme Court rules bus segregation unconstitutional 

January 1957: ·Southern Christian Leadership Conference forms in Atlanta, electing King president 

February 1957: ·King is featured on the cover of Time Magazine 

October 23, 1957: ·King's second child, Martin Luther King III, is born 

September 17, 1958: ·King's first book, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story is published 

September 20, 1958: ·A mentally ill black woman stabs King in at a Harlem book- signing 

February 1959: ·King studies non-violent tactics during a trip to India 

January 1960: ·King returns to Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta 

October 19, 1960: ·King is arrested in Atlanta, at one of hundreds of sit-ins that occur throughout the year 

January 30, 1961: ·King's third child, Dexter Scott, is born 

May 1961: ·King assists in negotiations for the Freedom Riders 

December 1961: ·King goes to Albany Georgia, to aid a desegregation campaign, and is arrested 

July 27, 1962: ·King is arrested again in Albany 

March 28, 1963: ·King's fourth child, Bernice Albertina, is born 

April 1963: ·King spends a week in a Birmingham, Alabama jail and writes a letter to the nation 

May 3-5, 1963: ·Police attack protestors in Birmingham 

June 1963: ·King's second book, a collection of sermons, Strength to Love is published 

August 28, 1963: ·250,000 people march on Washington, and King delivers his "I Have a Dream" speech 

December 3, 1963: ·King meets with Lyndon Johnson to discuss civil rights legislation 

January 1964: · Time Magazine names King "Man of the Year" 

June 1964: ·King's book Why We Can't Wait is published. 

July 1964: ·The Civil Rights Act is signed into law 

September 18, 1964: ·King meets with Pope Pius VI 

December 10, 1964: ·King receives the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway 

February 2, 1965: ·King arrested in Selma, Alabama, during voter-registration drive 

February 21, 1965: ·Malcolm X is assassinated 

March 1965: ·King leads a march from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery 

August 1965: ·President Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act into law 

August 1965: ·Massive rioting occurs in Watts, California 

August 1965: ·King begins to speak out against the Vietnam War 

February 1966: ·King moves to Chicago to commence a SCLC campaign there 

June 1966: ·Stokely Carmichael popularizes Black Power as a civil rights rallying cry 

July 1966: ·King leads demonstrations in Chicago 

April 4, 1967: ·King delivers his first sermon devoted entirely to the issue of Vietnam 

November 27, 1967: ·King announces his vision of a Poor People's March on Washington 

March 28, 1968: ·King leads a march of black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee 

April 4, 1968: ·King is assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, in Memphis 

April 1968: ·riots break out across the nation in reaction to King's death 

November 2, 1983: ·King's birthday becomes a national holiday