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Aug 28, 1963 ce: martin luther king jr. gives "i have a dream" speech.

On August 28, 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington, a large gathering of civil rights protesters in Washington, D.C., United States.

Social Studies, Civics, U.S. History

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On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., took the podium at the March on Washington  and addressed the gathered crowd, which numbered 200,000 people or more. His speech became famous for its recurring phrase “I have a dream.” He imagined a future in which “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners" could "sit down together at the table of brotherhood,” a future in which his four children are judged not "by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." King's moving speech became a central part of his legacy. King was born in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, in 1929. Like his father and grandfather, King studied theology and became a Baptist  pastor . In 1957, he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference ( SCLC ), which became a leading civil rights organization. Under King's leadership, the SCLC promoted nonviolent resistance to segregation, often in the form of marches and boycotts. In his campaign for racial equality, King gave hundreds of speeches, and was arrested more than 20 times. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 for his "nonviolent struggle for civil rights ." On April 4, 1968, King was shot and killed while standing on a balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, U.S.

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October 19, 2023

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Related Resources

Freedom's Ring "I Have a Dream" Speech

Main navigation.

Freedom's Ring  is Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, annotated. Here you can compare the written and spoken speech, explore multimedia images, listen to movement activists and uncover historical context.

Fifty years ago, in the concluding address of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, King demanded the riches of freedom and the security of justice. Today his language of love, nonviolent direct action and redemptive suffering, resonates globally in the millions who stand up for freedom and elevate democracy to its ideals. How do the echoes of King's Dream live within you?

Freedom's Ring serves as an innovative and thought-provoking resource for teachers, students, and the larger community. Evan Bissell, a Bay Area artist and educator, and webdesigner Erik Loyer worked with King Institute's Dr. Andrea McEvoy Spero,  Dr. Clayborne Carson and Regina Covington to create an engaging experience that documents one of the most famous events in Civil Rights history. Freedom's Ring compliments the King Legacy Series by Beacon Press and the corresponding curriculum guide. 

The 1963 March on Washington

A quarter million people and a dream.

On August 28, 1963, more than a quarter million people participated in the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, gathering near the Lincoln Memorial.

More than 3,000 members of the press covered this historic march, where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered the exalted "I Have a Dream" speech.

Originally conceived by renowned labor leader A. Phillip Randolph and Roy Wilkins, Executive Secretary of the NAACP, the March on Washington evolved into a collaborative effort amongst major civil rights groups and icons of the day.

Stemming from a rapidly growing tide of grassroots support and outrage over the nation's racial inequities, the rally drew over 260,000 people from across the nation.

Celebrated as one of the greatest — if not the greatest — speech of the 20th century, Dr. King's celebrated speech, "I Have a Dream," was carried live by television stations across the country. You can read the full speech and watch a short film, below.

A March 20 Years in the Making

In 1941, A. Phillip Randolph first conceptualized a "march for jobs" in protest of the racial discrimination against African Americans from jobs created by WWII and the New Deal programs created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The march was stalled, however, after negotiations between Roosevelt and Randolph prompted the establishment of the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC) and an executive order banning discrimination in defense industries.

The FEPC dissolved just five years later, causing Randolph to revive his plans. He looked to the charismatic Dr. King to breathe new life into the march.

NAACP and SCLC Center the March on Civil Rights

By the late 1950s, Dr. King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) were also planning to march on Washington, this time to march for freedom.

As the years passed on, the Civil Rights Act was still stalled in Congress, and equality for Americans of color still seemed like a far-fetched dream.

Randolph, his chief aide, Bayard Rustin, and Dr. King all decided it would be best to combine the two causes into one mega-march, the March for Jobs and Freedom.

NAACP, headed by Roy Wilkins, was called upon to be one of the leaders of the march.

As one of the largest and most influential civil rights groups at the time, our organization harnessed the collective power of its members, organizing a march that was focused on the advancement of civil rights and the actualization of Dr. King's dream.

The Big Six

A quarter-million people strong, the march drew activists from far and wide.

Leaders of the six prominent civil rights groups at the time joined forces in organizing the march.

The group included Randolph, leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; Wilkins, Executive Secretary of the NAACP; Dr. King, Chairman of the SCLC; James Farmer, founder of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); John Lewis, President of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); and Whitney Young, Executive Director of the National Urban League.

Dr. King, originally slated to speak for 4 minutes, went on to speak for 16 minutes, giving one of the most iconic speeches in history.

"I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood." – I Have a Dream, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

It didn't take long for King's dream to come to fruition — the legislative aspect of the dream, that is.

After a decade of continued lobbying of Congress and the President led by the NAACP, plus other peaceful protests for civil rights, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

One year later, he signed the National Voting Rights Act of 1965 .

Together, these laws outlawed discrimination against blacks and women, effectively ending segregation, and sought to end disenfranchisement by making discriminatory voting practices illegal.

Ten years after King joined the civil rights fight, the campaign to secure the enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act had achieved its goal – to ensure that black citizens would have the power to represent themselves in government.

2020 March on Washington

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered this iconic 'I Have a Dream' speech at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. See entire text of King's speech below.

I Have a Dream

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free; one hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination; one hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity; one hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land.

So we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was the promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note in so far as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we have come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now.

This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.

Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy; now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice; now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood; now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment.

This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content, will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the worn threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protests to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy, which has engulfed the Negro community, must not lead us to a distrust of all white people. For many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.

We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.

There are those who are asking the devotees of Civil Rights, "When will you be satisfied?"

We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality; we can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities; we cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one; we can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating "For Whites Only"; we cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro in Mississippi cannot vote, and the Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.

No! no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until "justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream."

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality.

You have been the veterans of creative suffering.

Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.

Go back to Mississippi. Go back to Alabama. Go back to South Carolina. Go back to Georgia. Go back to Louisiana. Go back to the slums and ghettos of our Northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.

It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day down in Alabama — with its vicious racists, with its Governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification — one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low. The rough places will be plain and the crooked places will be made straight, "and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together."

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.

With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brother-hood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

And this will be the day.

This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning, "My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my father died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring." And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.

So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire; let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York; let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania; let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado; let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.

But not only that.

Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia; let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee; let freedom ring from every hill and mole hill of Mississippi. "From every mountainside, let freedom ring."

And when this happens, and when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

"Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last."

Source: Martin Luther King, Jr., I Have A Dream: Writings and Speeches that Changed the World (San Francisco: Harper, 1986) via Teaching America History.

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‘He Had Transformed’: What It Was Like to Watch Martin Luther King Jr. Give the ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech

T uesday marks 55 years since the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech to the crowd that had gathered around the Lincoln Memorial for the Aug. 28, 1963, March on Washington.

While planning for the event had been going on for years before that day, and copies of the speech drafts and notes show that King had been working on what to say for weeks, many may not realize that the most famous lines were not planned at all.

Some credit goes to the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, King’s former legal counsel Clarence B. Jones , 87, tells TIME. She was one of his most trusted advisors — and an informal therapist of sorts, as Jones frames it. “When he would get very down and depressed, he would ask his secretary Dora McDonald to get Mahalia on the phone,” he says. “He would lean back, close his eyes, and tears would run down his face as she would sing to him.”

So it’s not a surprise that after she performed “How I Got Over” and “I’ve Been ‘Buked and I’ve Been Scorned” at the march, she stuck close by through what would turn out to be one of his most important speeches.

“What most people don’t know is that she shouted to him as he was speaking, ‘Martin! Tell them about the dream! Martin, tell them about the dream!’ I was there. I saw it with my own eyes. I was not on the stage, Dr. King’s back was to me as he was speaking, but I could hear and see him,” Jones tells TIME. “He took the written text that he had been reading from and moved it to the left side of the lectern, grabbed both hands of the lectern, and looked out to the thousands of people out there, and that’s when he started speaking extemporaneously. When Baptist preachers get particularly moved, many of them have a habit of taking their right foot as they’re standing and rubbing it up and down the lower part of their left leg. I saw Martin start to rub his right foot on the lower part of his left leg, and I said to someone who was standing next to me, ‘These people out there, they don’t know it, but they’re about ready to go to church.'”

The day unleashed a side of King that Jones had never seen before.

Step Into History: Learn how to experience the 1963 March on Washington in virtual reality

It wasn’t the precise wording that was new. King had even used the phrase “I Have a Dream,” just a couple months earlier in Detroit at a rally for freedom that Reverend C.L. Franklin, Aretha Franklin’s father, helped organize, and “it did not evoke any kind of special response,” says Jones, who went on to write the book Behind the Dream : The Making of the Speech that Transformed a Nation .

“I had seen Dr. King speak many times in churches throughout the country, but [at the March on Washington] there was something kind of mystical. He had transformed. Oh my God, something had taken over his body. It was spell-binding,” Jones says. “The speech was, in its content, not a profound analysis or commentary, but it’s the way he spoke and the intensity of how he felt.”

Jones believes that intensity came from the challenge of asking America to live up to its ideals just four months after the nation had been confronted with horrifying photographs and television footage of African-American adults and children being faced down with police dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham, Ala.

“I think [the speech] was giving an answer to a rhetorical question addressed collectively to the nation. That question is: what kind of country are we? The speech was a call to the soul of America. It was a call to the moral conscience of America. The powerful use of the phrase ‘I have a dream’ was a summons to the conscience of America,” Jones says. “One of the things King knew at that time is that no matter how compelling the case was on its merits for ending racial segregation, there was no way in hell that African Americans would be able to impose that point of view on the white American majority. The only way it was going to happen is when we got the majority of white people to understand that it was in [their] self-interest that this practice of racial segregation end. That we can be better than we are.”

Today, Jones says, “unsolved” racial equality issues and income inequality mean that the theme of America not living up to its ideals is more relevant than ever . Jones, who lives in Palo Alto, Calif., says he sees that fact regularly in his everyday life: “I’m out here in Silicon Valley — how is it that there are homeless people sleeping on the streets in San Francisco?”

But, he also says, the solution to that problem is something all Americans can help with.

“At the end of the day, if you want to implement Martin King’s dream, if you’re eligible to vote, you have to register to vote, and you have to vote,” he says. “If you want to implement his dreams, you can only do that from power, and power doesn’t come from speeches. Power comes from voting. Anyone who wants to honor Martin’s legacy tomorrow, that’s the best way to pay tribute to his dream.”

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The Lasting Power of Dr. King’s Dream Speech

By Michiko Kakutani

• Aug. 27, 2013

It was late in the day and hot, and after a long march and an afternoon of speeches about federal legislation, unemployment and racial and social justice, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. finally stepped to the lectern, in front of the Lincoln Memorial, to address the crowd of 250,000 gathered on the National Mall.

He began slowly, with magisterial gravity, talking about what it was to be black in America in 1963 and the “shameful condition” of race relations a hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Unlike many of the day’s previous speakers, he did not talk about particular bills before Congress or the marchers’ demands. Instead, he situated the civil rights movement within the broader landscape of history — time past, present and future — and within the timeless vistas of Scripture.

Dr. King was about halfway through his prepared speech when Mahalia Jackson — who earlier that day had delivered a stirring rendition of the spiritual “I Been ’Buked and I Been Scorned” — shouted out to him from the speakers’ stand: “Tell ’em about the ‘Dream,’ Martin, tell ’em about the ‘Dream’!” She was referring to a riff he had delivered on earlier occasions, and Dr. King pushed the text of his remarks to the side and began an extraordinary improvisation on the dream theme that would become one of the most recognizable refrains in the world.

With his improvised riff, Dr. King took a leap into history, jumping from prose to poetry, from the podium to the pulpit. His voice arced into an emotional crescendo as he turned from a sobering assessment of current social injustices to a radiant vision of hope — of what America could be. “I have a dream,” he declared, “my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!”

Many in the crowd that afternoon, 50 years ago on Wednesday, had taken buses and trains from around the country. Many wore hats and their Sunday best — “People then,” the civil rights leader John Lewis would recall, “when they went out for a protest, they dressed up” — and the Red Cross was passing out ice cubes to help alleviate the sweltering August heat. But if people were tired after a long day, they were absolutely electrified by Dr. King. There was reverent silence when he began speaking, and when he started to talk about his dream, they called out, “Amen,” and, “Preach, Dr. King, preach,” offering, in the words of his adviser Clarence B. Jones, “every version of the encouragements you would hear in a Baptist church multiplied by tens of thousands.”

You could feel “the passion of the people flowing up to him,” James Baldwin, a skeptic of that day’s March on Washington, later wrote, and in that moment, “it almost seemed that we stood on a height, and could see our inheritance; perhaps we could make the kingdom real.”

Dr. King’s speech was not only the heart and emotional cornerstone of the March on Washington, but also a testament to the transformative powers of one man and the magic of his words. Fifty years later, it is a speech that can still move people to tears. Fifty years later, its most famous lines are recited by schoolchildren and sampled by musicians. Fifty years later, the four words “I have a dream” have become shorthand for Dr. King’s commitment to freedom, social justice and nonviolence, inspiring activists from Tiananmen Square to Soweto, Eastern Europe to the West Bank.

Why does Dr. King’s “Dream” speech exert such a potent hold on people around the world and across the generations? Part of its resonance resides in Dr. King’s moral imagination. Part of it resides in his masterly oratory and gift for connecting with his audience — be they on the Mall that day in the sun or watching the speech on television or, decades later, viewing it online. And part of it resides in his ability, developed over a lifetime, to convey the urgency of his arguments through language richly layered with biblical and historical meanings.

The son, grandson and great-grandson of Baptist ministers, Dr. King was comfortable with the black church’s oral tradition, and he knew how to read his audience and react to it; he would often work jazzlike improvisations around favorite sermonic riffs — like the “dream” sequence — cutting and pasting his own words and those of others. At the same time, the sonorous cadences and ringing, metaphor-rich language of the King James Bible came instinctively to him. Quotations from the Bible, along with its vivid imagery, suffused his writings, and he used them to put the sufferings of African-Americans in the context of Scripture — to give black audience members encouragement and hope, and white ones a visceral sense of identification.

In his “Dream” speech, Dr. King alludes to a famous passage from Galatians, when he speaks of “that day when all of God’s children — black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics — will be able to join hands.” As he did in many of his sermons, he also drew parallels between “the Negro” still an “exile in his own land” and the plight of the Israelites in Exodus, who, with God on their side, found deliverance from hardship and oppression, escaping slavery in Egypt to journey toward the Promised Land.

The entire March on Washington speech reverberates with biblical rhythms and parallels, and bristles with a panoply of references to other historical and literary texts that would have resonated with his listeners. In addition to allusions to the prophets Isaiah (“I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low”) and Amos (“We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream”), there are echoes of the Declaration of Independence (“the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”); Shakespeare (“this sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent”); and popular songs like Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” (“Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York,” “Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California”).

Such references added amplification and depth of field to the speech, much the way T. S. Eliot’s myriad allusions in “The Waste Land” add layered meaning to that poem. Dr. King, who had a doctorate in theology and once contemplated a career in academia, was shaped by both his childhood in his father’s church and his later studies of disparate thinkers like Reinhold Niebuhr, Gandhi and Hegel. Along the way, he developed a gift for synthesizing assorted ideas and motifs and making them his own — a gift that enabled him to address many different audiences at once, while making ideas that some might find radical somehow familiar and accessible. It was a gift that in some ways mirrored his abilities as the leader of the civil rights movement, tasked with holding together often contentious factions (from more militant figures like Stokely Carmichael to more conservative ones like Roy Wilkins), while finding a way to balance the concerns of grass-roots activists with the need to forge a working alliance with the federal government.

At the same time, Dr. King was also able to nestle his arguments within a historical continuum, lending them the authority of tradition and the weight of association. For some, in his audience, the articulation of his dream for America would have evoked conscious or unconscious memories of Langston Hughes’s call in a 1935 poem to “let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed” and W. E. B. Du Bois’s description of the “wonderful America, which the founding fathers dreamed.” His final lines in the March on Washington speech come from a Negro spiritual reminding listeners of slaves’ sustaining faith in the possibility of liberation: “Free at last, free at last; thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”

For those less familiar with African-American music and literature, there were allusions with immediate, patriotic connotations. Much the way Lincoln redefined the founders’ vision of America in his Gettysburg Address by invoking the Declaration of Independence, so Dr. King in his “Dream” speech makes references to both the Gettysburg Address and the Declaration of Independence. These deliberate echoes helped universalize the moral underpinnings of the civil rights movement and emphasized that its goals were only as revolutionary as the founding fathers’ original vision of the United States. Dr. King’s dream for America’s “citizens of color” was no more, no less than the American Dream of a country where “all men are created equal.”

As for Dr. King’s quotation of “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” — an almost de facto national anthem, familiar even to children — it underscored civil rights workers’ patriotic belief in the project of reinventing America. For Dr. King, it might have elicited personal memories, too. The night his home was bombed during the bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., endangering the lives of his wife, Coretta, and their infant daughter, he calmed the crowd gathered in front of their house, saying, “I want you to love our enemies.” Some of his supporters reportedly broke into song, including hymns and “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.”

The March on Washington and Dr. King’s “Dream” speech would play an important role in helping pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the pivotal Selma to Montgomery march that he led in 1965 would provide momentum for the passage later that year of the Voting Rights Act. Though Dr. King received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 , his exhausting schedule (he had been giving hundreds of speeches a year) and his frustration with schisms in the civil rights movement and increasing violence in the country led to growing weariness and depression before his assassination in 1968.

The knowledge that Dr. King gave his life to the cause lends an added poignancy to the experience of hearing his speeches today. And so does being reminded now — in the second term of Barack Obama’s presidency — of the dire state of race relations in the early 1960s, when towns in the South still had separate schools, restaurants, hotels and bathrooms for blacks and whites, and discrimination in housing and employment was prevalent across the country. Only two and a half months before the “Dream” speech, Gov. George Wallace had stood in a doorway at the University of Alabama in an attempt to block two black students from trying to register; the next day the civil rights activist Medgar Evers was assassinated in front of his home in Jackson, Miss.

President Obama, who once wrote about his mother’s coming home “with books on the civil rights movement, the recordings of Mahalia Jackson, the speeches of Dr. King,” has described the leaders of the movement as “giants whose shoulders we stand on.” Some of his own speeches owe a clear debt to Dr. King’s ideas and words.

In his 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address, which brought him to national attention, Mr. Obama channeled Dr. King’s vision of hope, speaking of coming “together as one American family.” In his 2008 speech about race, he talked, much as Dr. King had, of continuing “on the path of a more perfect union.” And in his 2007 speech commemorating the 1965 Selma march, he echoed Dr. King’s remarks about Exodus, describing Dr. King and the other civil rights leaders as members of the Moses generation who “pointed the way” and “took us 90 percent of the way there.” He and his contemporaries were their heirs, Mr. Obama said — they were members of the Joshua generation with the responsibility of finishing “the journey Moses had begun.”

Dr. King knew it would not be easy to “transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood” — difficulties that persist today with new debates over voter registration laws and the Trayvon Martin shooting. Dr. King probably did not foresee a black president celebrating the 50th anniversary of his speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial, and surely did not foresee a monument to himself just a short walk away. But he did dream of a future in which the country embarked on “the sunlit path of racial justice,” and he foresaw, with bittersweet prescience, that 1963, as he put it, was “not an end, but a beginning.”

Follow Michiko Kakutani on Twitter: @michikokakutani

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The first amendment, 10 fascinating facts about the “i have a dream” speech.

August 28, 2023 | by NCC Staff

Link : Full Speech from the National Archives

The speech was delivered to an estimated 250,000 people who came to Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963 to march for civil rights.

Here are 10 facts about the march and the events that led to the speech.

1. The official event was called the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” On June 11, 1963, President John F. Kennedy made a nationally televised address calling for a drive for more civil rights. That same night, NAACP leader Medgar Evers was murdered in Mississippi.

2. Marches had been proposed before the Kennedy speech and Evers’ killing, but the events forced the issue. Kennedy met with civil rights leaders such as King, Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young and student leader John Lewis about a proposed march. Kennedy signaled his approval publicly in July when he was assured it would be a peaceful event.

3. The March was not universally supported by activists. Prominent objectors included Malcolm X and Strom Thurmond. The organizers didn’t agree on all the issues, either, but they did agree that people should march together at the event.

4. It also wasn’t the first threatened March on Washington by civil rights leaders. In 1941, organizers were planning a march to demand desegregation in the U.S. military as World War II approached. But President Franklin Roosevelt averted the march by signing Executive Order 8802 in June, 1941, banning discrimination in the federal government and defense industries. .

5. Almost no one could clearly hear King’s speech. An expensive sound system was installed for the event, but it was sabotaged right before it. Attorney General Robert Kennedy enlisted the Army Corps of Engineers to fix the system.

6. William Edward Burghardt "W. E. B." Du Bois, the co-founder of the NAACP, died on the day before the event at the age of 95 in Ghana. Roy Wilkins asked the marchers to honor Du Bois with a moment of silence.

7. An estimated 250,000 people attended the March . People came from all over the country, and few arrests were reported.

8. There were 10 speakers on the official program for the public event at the Lincoln Memorial: All of them were men. Rabbi Joachim Prinz spoke right before King.  There were no speakers after King, as organizers led the audience in a pledge and gave a benediction.

9. King almost didn’t give the “I Have a Dream” par t of the “I Have A Dream” speech. Singer Mahalia Jackson urged King to tell the audience “about the dream,” and King went into an improvised section of the speech.

10. The person who wound up with the typewritten speech given by King is retired college basketball coach George Raveling. A college basketball player at Villanova, organizers saw Raveling in the crowd and asked him to be a bodyguard on stage. He stood  next to King on stage, and decided to ask him for the paper copy of the speech. King obliged and Raveling has the speech locked away in a safe place, with no intention of selling it.

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7 Facts About Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech

By mark mancini | jan 20, 2020.

On August 28, 1963, under a sweltering sun, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators gathered by the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. to participate in an event formally known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. From start to finish, it was a passionate plea for civil rights reform, and one speech in particular captured the ethos of the moment. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 17-minute “I Have a Dream” address—which was broadcast in real time by TV networks and radio stations—was an oratorical masterpiece. Here are some facts about the inspired remarks that changed King's life, his movement, and the nation at large.

1. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the tenth orator to take the podium that day.

Organizers hoped the March would draw a crowd of about 100,000 people; more than twice as many showed up. There at the Lincoln Memorial, 10 civil rights activists were scheduled to give speeches—to be punctuated by hymns, prayers, pledges, benedictions, and choir performances.

King was the lineup’s tenth and final speaker. The list of orators also included labor icon A. Philip Randolph and 23-year-old John Lewis , who was then the national chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. (He’s now a U.S. congressman representing Georgia’s fifth district.)

2. Nelson Rockefeller inspired part of the "I Have A Dream" speech.

For years, Clarence B. Jones was Dr. King’s personal attorney, a trusted advisor, and one of his speechwriters. He also became a frequent intermediary between King and Stanley Levison , a progressive white lawyer who had drawn FBI scrutiny. In mid-August 1963, King asked Jones and Levison to prepare a draft of his upcoming March on Washington address.

“A conversation that I’d had [four months earlier] with then-New York governor Nelson Rockefeller inspired an opening analogy: African Americans marching to Washington to redeem a promissory note or a check for justice,” Jones recalled in 2011. “From there, a proposed draft took shape.”

3. The phrase “I have a dream” wasn’t in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s prepared speech.

On the eve of his big speech, King solicited last-minute input from union organizers, religious leaders, and other activists in the lobby of Washington, D.C.’s Willard Hotel. But when he finally faced the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial, the reverend went off-book. At first King more or less stuck to his notes, reciting the final written version of his address.

Then a voice rang out behind him. Seated nearby was gospel singer Mahalia Jackson , who yelled, “Tell ‘em about the dream, Martin!” Earlier in his career, King had spoken at length about his “dreams” of racial harmony. By mid-1963, he’d used the phrase “I have a dream” so often that confidants worried it was making him sound repetitive.

Jackson clearly didn't agree. At her urging, King put down his notes and delivered the words that solidified his legacy:

“I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream ... I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

King's friends were stunned. None of these lines had made it into the printed statement King brought to the podium. “In front of all those people, cameras, and microphones, Martin winged it,” Jones would later say. “But then, no one I’ve ever met could improvise better.”

4. Sidney Poitier heard the "I Have A Dream" speech in person.

Sidney Poitier, who was born in the Bahamas on February 20, 1927, broke Hollywood's glass ceiling at the 1964 Academy Awards when he became the first African American to win the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in Lilies of the Field (and the only one until Denzel Washington won for Training Day nearly 40 years later). Poitier, a firm believer in civil rights, attended the ’63 March on Washington along with such other movie stars as Marlon Brando , Charlton Heston, and Paul Newman.

5. The "I Have A Dream" speech caught the FBI’s attention.

The FBI had had been wary of King since the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was perturbed by the reverend’s association with Stanley Levison, who’d been a financial manager for the Communist party in America. King's “I Have a Dream” speech only worsened the FBI’s outlook on the civil rights leader.

In a memo written just two days after the speech, domestic intelligence chief William Sullivan said, “We must mark [King] now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security.” Before the year was out, attorney general Robert F. Kennedy gave the FBI permission to wiretap King’s telephone conversations.

6. In 1999, scholars named "I Have a Dream" the best American speech of the 20th century.

All these years later, “I Have a Dream” remains an international rallying cry for peace. (Signs bearing that timeless message appeared at the Tiananmen Square protests ). When communications professors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Texas A&M used input from 137 scholars to create a list of the 100 greatest American speeches given in the 20th century, King’s magnum opus claimed the number one spot—beating out the first inaugural addresses of John F. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt , among others.

7. A basketball Hall of Famer owns the original copy of the "I Have a Dream" speech.

George Raveling, an African-American athlete and D.C. native, played college hoops for the Villanova Wildcats from 1956 through 1960. Three years after his graduation, he attended the March on Washington. He and a friend volunteered to join the event’s security detail, which is how Raveling ended up standing just a few yards away from Martin Luther King Jr. during his “I Have a Dream” address. Once the speech ended, Raveling approached the podium and noticed that the three-page script was in the Reverend’s hand. “Dr. King, can I have that copy?,” he asked. Raveling's request was granted .

Raveling went on to coach the Washington State Cougars, Iowa Hawkeyes, and University of Southern California Trojans. In 2015, he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. Although a collector once offered him $3 million for Dr. King’s famous document, Raveling’s refused to part with it.

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7 Things You May Not Know About MLK’s ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech

By: Sarah Pruitt

Updated: August 3, 2023 | Original: January 13, 2021

On August 28, 1963, in front of a crowd of nearly 250,000 people spread across the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the Baptist preacher and civil rights leader Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his now-famous “I Have a Dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Organizers of the event, officially known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, had hoped 100,000 people would attend. In the end, more than twice that number flooded into the nation’s capital for the massive protest march, making it the largest demonstration in U.S. history to that date.

King’s “I Have a Dream” speech now stands out as one of the 20th century’s most unforgettable moments, but a few facts about it may still surprise you.

1. There were initially no women included in the event.

Despite the central role that women like Rosa Parks , Ella Baker, Daisy Bates and others played in the civil rights movement , all the speakers at the March on Washington were men. But at the urging of Anna Hedgeman, the only woman on the planning committee, the organizers added a “Tribute to Negro Women Fighters for Freedom” to the program. Bates spoke briefly in the place of Myrlie Evers, widow of the murdered civil rights leader Medgar Evers , and Parks and several others were recognized and asked to take a bow. “We will sit-in and we will kneel-in and we will lie-in if necessary until every Negro in America can vote,” Bates said. “This we pledge to the women of America.”

2. A white labor leader and a rabbi were among the 10 speakers on stage that day.

King was preceded by nine other speakers, notably including civil rights leaders like A. Philip Randolph and a young John Lewis , the future congressman from Georgia. The most prominent white speaker was Walter Reuther , head of the United Automobile Workers, a powerful labor union. The UAW helped fund the March on Washington, and Reuther would later march alongside King from Selma to Montgomery to protest for Black voting rights. 

Joachim Prinz, the president of the American Jewish Congress, spoke directly before King. “A great people who had created a great civilization had become a nation of silent onlookers,” Prinz said of his experience as a rabbi in Berlin during the horrors perpetrated by Adolf Hitler ’s Nazi regime. “America must not become a nation of onlookers. America must not remain silent.”

3. King almost didn’t deliver what is now the most famous part of the speech.

King had debuted the phrase “I have a dream” in his speeches at least nine months before the March on Washington, and used it several times since then. His advisers discouraged him from using the same theme again, and he had apparently drafted a version of the speech that didn’t include it. But as he spoke that day, the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson prompted him to “Tell them about the dream, Martin.” Abandoning his prepared text, King improvised the rest of his speech, with electrifying results.

4. The speech makes allusions to the Gettysburg Address, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, Shakespeare and the Bible.

“Five score years ago,” King began, referencing the opening of Abraham Lincoln ’s Gettysburg Address as well as the Emancipation Proclamation , which had gone into effect in 1863. After 100 years, King noted, “the Negro is still not free,” and the rights promised in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were still denied to Black Americans.

The image of “this sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent” echoes the opening soliloquy in William Shakespeare ’s Richard III (“Now is the winter of our discontent”), while the soaring end of the speech, with its repeated refrains of “Let freedom ring” calls on the 19th-century patriotic song "My Country 'Tis of Thee," written by Samuel Francis Smith.

Finally, King’s speech repeatedly draws on the Bible , including an allusion to the Book of Psalms (“Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning”) and a quote from the Book of Isaiah (“Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low...”), to name just two references.

5. The speech impressed the Kennedy administration and helped advance civil rights legislation in Congress.

All three major TV networks at the time (ABC, CBS and NBC) aired King’s speech, and though he was already a national figure by that time, it marked the first time many Americans — reportedly including President John F. Kennedy — had heard him deliver an entire speech. Kennedy was assassinated less than three months later, but his successor, Lyndon Johnson , would sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law, marking the most significant advances in civil rights legislation since Reconstruction .

6. The success of the speech attracted the attention (and suspicion) of the FBI.

Federal authorities monitored the March on Washington closely , fearing sedition and violence. Policing of the march turned into a military operation, codenamed Operation Steep Hill, with 19,000 troops put on standby in the D.C. suburbs to quell possible rioting (which didn’t happen). After the event, FBI official William Sullivan wrote that King’s “powerful, demagogic speech” meant that “we must mark him now...as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation.” 

At the FBI’s urging, Attorney General Robert Kennedy authorized the installation of wiretaps on King’s phone and those at the offices of his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), ostensibly to look into potential communist ties. The FBI later stepped up its surveillance of King, which lasted until his assassination in 1968.

7. The King family still owns the 'I Have a Dream' speech.

Though it is one of the most famous and widely celebrated speeches in U.S. history, the “I Have a Dream” speech is not in the public domain, but is protected by copyright—which is owned and enforced by King’s heirs. As reported in the Washington Post , King himself obtained the rights a month after he gave the speech, when he sued two companies selling unauthorized copies. Though some parts of the speech may be used lawfully without approval (for example, individual teachers have been able to use the speech in their classrooms), the King estate requires anyone who wants to air the speech to pay for that right. 

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Honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dear UT Community,

Today, as we remember and celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., it is an opportunity for us to think as a community about where Dr. King said we should go, how we get there, and our actions along the way.

When Dr. King gave what would be his final speech on a rainy April night in Memphis 56 years ago, he concluded an hour of extemporaneous remarks by telling his audience that he had been to the mountaintop and seen what was on the other side.

“I’ve seen the Promised Land,” Dr. King said. “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.” 

That was Dr. King’s final call to action. Today and every day, it is incumbent upon us to answer that call. And the real progress — the real fulfillment of his dream — will come in our actions toward one another, day after day, as we march toward a place where all people are treated equally, where racism is fully eradicated, and where there is opportunity, freedom, and true justice for all.  That is the Promised Land that Dr. King envisioned — and we must get there.

But just as important is how we treat one another during the journey. Here at UT, we are striving to become the highest-impact public research university in the world. And what greater way to demonstrate our impact than to help fulfill Dr. King’s vision? As a student at Morehouse College, Dr. King wrote that education is not just about intelligence, but “intelligence plus character.” That description is instructive as we go about our work at this University.

We are known to attract students with extremely high intelligence. Part of developing that intelligence is also developing their character — to ensure our students understand their own role in creating the world that Dr. King dreamt about. It begins with our work on this campus to foster a sense of belonging for all Longhorns.

Our campus should be a community that upholds the highest ideals of Dr. King’s Promised Land — opportunity, hope, justice and equality — for every person who learns here, works here, or is just passing through. The true power of education — of intelligence plus character — is found in how we use what we learn for the betterment of others. What we learn here should extend into the world.

After all, when Dr. King visited UT in 1962 to push for full integration, he said, “I do believe there is a difference between saying something and doing something.” That is how we measure our true impact: not by what we say, but by what we do.

So today, we celebrate the legacy of Dr. King. We give thanks for all who have answered his call, and we recommit ourselves to reaching that Promised Land as individuals and as the University of Texas community.

110 Inner Campus Drive Stop G3400 Austin, TX 78712-3400 512-471-1232 (Phone) 512-471-8102 (Fax) [email protected]

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Biden is the graduation speaker for Martin Luther King’s alma mater. It’s a moral disaster

The US president continues to support Israel in its onslaught on Gaza. Morehouse College’s most famous alumnus was anti-war

M orehouse College is a special place. The only all-male historically Black college in the world, it has alumni ranging from Dr Martin Luther King Jr, the most celebrated anti-war civil rights leader in history, to Theodore “Ted” Colbert III, the CEO of Boeing’s defense, space and security division, a key player in supplying the weapons technologies for Israel’s months-long campaign of military vengeance on Palestinians.

While there is much diversity among the ranks of this brotherhood, Morehouse – also my alma mater – places a primacy on moral leadership and service, and Dr King has been a critical avatar in these efforts. There is a prominent statue of him on campus, his likeness is depicted as a silhouette on official college brochures, the chapel on campus is named in his honor. His papers are held nearby at the Robert W Woodruff Library. Considering King’s anti-militarism, and the college’s embrace of him as a beacon on campus, the decision to invite Joe Biden to give Morehouse’s commencement speech to this year’s graduating class is a moral disaster. The US president’s staunch support of Israel in the face of its unrelenting assault on Palestinians in the Israel-Gaza war has sparked sustained protests throughout the country, most recently on multiple college campuses. And though some have tried to take King’s defense of Israel’s right to exist as evidence that he would affirm without qualification Israel’s present military campaign, his broader anti-militarism cannot be conveniently pushed aside, nor can his stated desire for a peaceful resolution in the region.

Israeli defense forces have killed more than 30,000 Palestinians since 7 October, more than 72,000 have been injured, and more than 1 million have been displaced and are vulnerable to hunger and disease. Meanwhile, US officials continue to say there is “no evidence” of genocide, even as experts say otherwise. For Biden’s part, he has not indicated that the US will stop sending weapons to Israel; and he has continued to direct his representatives at the UN to either abstain or vote against any ceasefire resolution brought before them.

This all reveals a striking distance between the Dr King who opposed war and violence and the imaginary Dr King who Morehouse’s president, David A Thomas, has conjured up. In an email to students, faculty and alumni announcing Biden’s acceptance of the speaking invitation, Thomas wrote: “drawing inspiration from Dr King’s vision of the Beloved Community, we recognize that personal, community, and international conflicts are inescapable. However, it is our moral duty to resolve these conflicts peacefully and to reconcile through an inclusive, joint commitment to goodwill and allyship.” Thomas might want to communicate this to Biden.

Biden’s refusal to halt military aid to Israel or to call for an immediate and lasting ceasefire has resulted in an electoral censure . Led by Arab Americans, thousands of Democratic primary voters across several states are selecting “uncommitted” on their ballots in protest. The president struggles with most of his key constituencies, most notably Black voters. It is likely that anxieties about the declining support among young Black voters weighed on Biden’s decision to accept the Morehouse invitation some seven months after it was extended. He seems to want to appeal to them for political support without boldly addressing the issues that routinely come up for them, such as crippling student debt and higher costs of living.

Meanwhile, students in the Atlanta University Center Consortium (AUCC) – a group of historically Black institutions including Clark Atlanta University, Spelman College, Morehouse College and Morehouse School of Medicine – have been unequivocal in calling out their administrations’ ties to companies doing business with Israel. Coalitions such as the Student Intercommunal Coordinating Committee have also connected the issue of Palestine to the Stop Cop City movement, which aims to prevent the construction of a law enforcement training center in Atlanta. For their efforts, they have faced harassment, intimidation and the possibility of arrest. (More than 300 AUCC alumni have signed a letter urging the administrations to support students’ right to organize and protest on campus.)

A small but intrepid group called Faculty for Justice in Palestine – Georgia has joined students in calling AUCC administrations to account. In a recent statement calling on Morehouse leadership to rescind its invitation to Biden, group leaders wrote, “any college or university that gives its commencement stage to President Biden in this moment is endorsing genocide.” (Biden is also delivering the commencement address at West Point.)

Students around the country, including many in the AUCC, are standing in the tradition of Dr King. They do so in the context of a broader movement and crackdown – the most intense this country has seen since 1968. Biden has smeared these students – the very people he needs to secure his electoral prospects – as “antisemitic” and uninformed. College and university administrations set riot police upon them and threaten them with disciplinary action.

At precisely the moment when students all over the country are showing us the meaning of courage, Morehouse’s invitation to the president shows profound cowardice. The moral leaders in this moment have been clear all along. We should join them.

Jared Loggins is a professor of Black studies and political science at Amherst College.

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Black History Month 2024

5 mlk speeches you should know. spoiler: 'i have a dream' isn't on the list.

Scott Neuman

The Rev. Ralph Abernathy (left) shakes hands with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Montgomery, Ala., on March 22, 1956, as a big crowd of supporters cheers for King, who had just been found guilty of leading the Montgomery bus boycott. Gene Herrick/AP hide caption

The Rev. Ralph Abernathy (left) shakes hands with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Montgomery, Ala., on March 22, 1956, as a big crowd of supporters cheers for King, who had just been found guilty of leading the Montgomery bus boycott.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s " I Have a Dream " speech, delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, is so famous that it often eclipses his other speeches.

King's greatest contribution to the Civil Rights Movement was his oratory, says Jason Miller, an English professor at North Carolina State University who has written extensively on King's speeches.

Black History Month 2024 has begun. Here's this year's theme and other things to know

"King's first biographer was a dear friend of Dr. King's, L.D. Reddick ," Miller says. Reddick once suggested to King that maybe more marching and less speaking was needed to push the cause of civil rights forward. According to Miller, King is said to have responded, "My dear man, you never deny an artist his medium."

Miller says that in his research, he found numerous examples of King reworking and recycling old speeches. "He would rewrite them ... just to change phrasings and rhythms. And so he prepared a great deal, often 19 lines per page on a yellow legal sheet."

Often, King would write notes to himself in the margins: "what tenor and tone to deliver," Miller says.

That phrasing and an understanding of cadence were all important to the success of these speeches, according to Carolyn Calloway-Thomas, director of graduate studies at the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University.

King's training in the pulpit gave him a strong insight into what moves an audience, she says. "Preachers are performers. They know when to pause. How long to pause. And with what effect. And he certainly was a great user of dramatic pauses."

Here are four of King's speeches that sometimes get overlooked, plus the one he delivered the day before his 1968 assassination. Collectively, they represent historical signposts on the road to civil rights.

" Give Us the Ballot " (May 17, 1957 — Washington, D.C.)

King spoke at the Lincoln Memorial three years to the day after the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education , which struck down the "separate but equal" doctrine that had allowed segregation in public schools.

But Jim Crow persisted throughout much of the South. The yearlong Montgomery bus boycott , sparked by the arrest of Rosa Parks, had ended only months before King's speech. And the Voting Rights Act of 1965 , which sought to end disenfranchisement of Black voters, was still eight years away.

"It's a very important speech because he's talking about the importance of voting and he's responding to some of the Southern resistance to the Brown decision," says Vicki Crawford, director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Collection at Morehouse College, King's alma mater .

U.S. deputy marshals escort 6-year-old Ruby Bridges from William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans in November 1960. The first-grader was the only Black child enrolled in the school, where parents of white students were boycotting the court-ordered integration law and were taking their children out of school. AP hide caption

U.S. deputy marshals escort 6-year-old Ruby Bridges from William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans in November 1960. The first-grader was the only Black child enrolled in the school, where parents of white students were boycotting the court-ordered integration law and were taking their children out of school.

The speech calls out both major political parties for betraying "the cause of justice" and failing to do enough to ensure civil rights for Blacks. He accuses Democrats of "capitulating to the prejudices and undemocratic practices of the Southern Dixiecrats," referring to the party's pro-segregation wing. The Republicans, King said, had instead capitulated "to the blatant hypocrisy of right-wing, reactionary Northerners."

King speaks at a mass demonstration at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on May 17, 1957, as civil rights leaders called on the U.S. government to put more teeth into the Supreme Court's desegregation decisions. Charles Gorry/AP hide caption

King speaks at a mass demonstration at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on May 17, 1957, as civil rights leaders called on the U.S. government to put more teeth into the Supreme Court's desegregation decisions.

He also indicts Northern liberals who are "so bent on seeing all sides" that they are "neither hot nor cold, but lukewarm" in their commitment to civil rights.

"King [was] calling on both parties to take a look at themselves," Crawford says.

With the movement gaining steam, King used his speech to take stock of where things stood and what must be done next, Calloway-Thomas says. "He is revisiting the status of African American people."

" Our God Is Marching On! " (March 25, 1965 — Montgomery, Ala.)

The speech was delivered after the last of three Selma-Montgomery marches to call for voting rights. Protesters were beaten by Alabama law enforcement officials at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on March 7 in what came to be known as Bloody Sunday . Among the nearly 60 wounded that day by club-wielding police was John Lewis, the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), who suffered a fractured skull. (Lewis later served 17 terms in the U.S. House of Representatives.) A second attempt to reach Montgomery a few days later was again turned back at the bridge. In a third try, marchers finally reached the steps of the Alabama State Capitol on March 25.

Rep. John Lewis, A Force In The Civil Rights Movement, Dead At 80

"Finally the group of protesters gets all the way to the Capitol, and King delivers a speech to what we think is about 25,000 people," Miller says. The speech is also often referred to as the "How Long? Not Long" speech because of that powerful refrain, Miller says.

Jonathan Eig, author of the biography King: A Life , published last year, says he thinks about three-fourths of the speech was written out. "Then [King] goes off script and gives a sermon."

That's when he answers the question "How long?" for his audience. How long will it be until Black people have the same rights as white people? "Not long, because no lie can live forever," King tells his exuberant listeners.

"That's the part that really echoes. No question," Eig says. "And I think that's when he knew he was at his best. He knew that he could bring the crowd to its feet and inspire them."

Also notable is a famous anecdote that King shared in his speech, one that appeared earlier in his 1963 " Letter from a Birmingham Jail " addressed to his "fellow clergymen." It relates the words of Sister Pollard, a 70-year-old Black woman who had walked everywhere, refusing to ride the Montgomery buses during the 1955-1956 boycott.

"One day, she was asked while walking if she didn't want to ride," King said, speaking to the crowd that had just successfully marched from Selma to Montgomery. "And when she answered, 'No,' the person said, 'Well, aren't you tired?' And with her ungrammatical profundity, she said, 'My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.'"

"And in a real sense this afternoon, we can say that our feet are tired but our souls are rested," he said.

The story of Sister Pollard would be used again in the coming years.

But the speech may be best remembered today for another line, where King said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

In fact, King was using the words of a 19th-century Unitarian minister, Theodore Parker . Parker was an abolitionist who secretly funded John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, often seen as an opening salvo of the Civil War. In a sermon given seven years before the raid, Parker used the line that King would pick up more than a century later.

"Dr. King absorbed all kinds of material, heard from others, used it on his own. But this is what we call appropriation or transformation when the old seems new," Miller says.

" Beyond Vietnam " (April 4, 1967 — New York City)

King had already begun speaking out about the war in Vietnam, but this speech was his most forceful statement on the conflict to date. Black soldiers were dying in disproportionate numbers . King noted the irony that in Vietnam, "Negro and white boys" were killing and dying alongside each other "for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools."

"So we watch them, in brutal solidarity, burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago," he said. "I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor."

An infantry soldier runs across a burned-out clearing in Vietnam on Jan. 4, 1967. Horst Faas/AP hide caption

An infantry soldier runs across a burned-out clearing in Vietnam on Jan. 4, 1967.

SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael , a major civil rights figure, had come out against the war and encouraged King to join him. But some in King's own inner circle had cautioned him against speaking about Vietnam.

Code Switch

Stokely carmichael, a philosopher behind the black power movement.

Although powerful and timely, the speech drew a harsh and immediate reaction from a nation that had only just begun to reckon with the rising casualties and economic toll of the war. Both The Washington Post and The New York Times published editorials criticizing it. The Post said King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people" and the Times said he had "dampened his prospects for becoming the Negro leader who might be able to get the nation 'moving again' on civil rights."

King knew he would take heat for the speech, especially from the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson, with whom he'd worked to get the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and, a year later, the Voting Rights Act, through Congress. With the presidential election just 19 months away, continued support of Johnson's Vietnam policy was crucial to his reelection. Nearly 10 months after the speech, however, the Tet Offensive launched by the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese army would help turn U.S. public opinion against the war and lead Johnson to not seek another term.

But in April 1967, the reaction to the speech was "far worse than King or his advisers imagined," says Miller, of North Carolina State University. Johnson "excommunicated" the civil rights leader, he says, adding that even leaders of the NAACP expressed disappointment that King had focused attention on the war.

"His immediate response was that he was crushed," Miller says. "There are a number of people who have documented that he literally broke down in tears when he realized the kind of backlash towards it."

He was criticized from both sides of the political aisle. Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., a staunch conservative who made a failed run for the presidency in 1964, said King's speech "could border a bit on treason."

"King himself said that he anguished over doing the speech," says Indiana University's Calloway-Thomas.

" The Three Evils of Society " (Aug. 31, 1967 — Chicago)

The three evils King outlines in this speech are poverty, racism and militarism . Referring to Johnson's Great Society program to help lift rural Americans out of poverty, King said that it had been "shipwrecked off the coast of Asia, on the dreadful peninsula of Vietnam" and that meanwhile, "the poor, Black and white are still perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity."

Calloway-Thomas calls it "the most scathing critique of American society by King that I have ever read."

"We need, according to him, a radical redistribution of political and economic power," she says, "Is that implying reparations? Is that implying socialism?"

Calloway-Thomas hears in King's words an antecedent to the Black Lives Matter movement. "One sees in that speech some relationship between the rhetoric of Dr. King at that moment and the rhetoric of Black Lives Matter at this moment," she says.

It was also one of the many instances where King quoted poet Langston Hughes, with whom he had become friends. "What happens to a dream deferred? It leads to bewildering frustration and corroding bitterness," King said in a nod to Hughes' most famous poem, " Harlem ."

King and Hughes traveled together to Nigeria in 1960, Miller notes, calling the poet an often unrecognized but nonetheless "central figure" in the early Civil Rights Movement. "They exchanged letters. Dr. King told [Hughes] how much he used his poetry. Dr. King used seven poems by Langston Hughes in his sermons and speeches from 1956 to 1958."

" I've Been to the Mountaintop! " (April 3, 1968 — Memphis, Tenn.)

This is King's last speech, delivered a day before his assassination at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968. He was in the city to lend his support and his voice to the city's striking sanitation workers .

"He wasn't expecting to give a speech that night," according to Clayborne Carson, Martin Luther King, Jr. centennial professor emeritus at Stanford University. "He was hoping to get out of it. He was not feeling well."

"They call him and say, 'The people here want to hear you. They don't want to hear us.' And plus, the place was packed that night" despite a heavy downpour, Carson says. "I think he recognized that people really wanted to hear him. And despite the state of his health, he decided to go."

Martin Luther King Jr. makes his last public appearance, at the Mason Temple in Memphis, Tenn., on April 3, 1968. The following day, King was assassinated on his motel balcony. Charles Kelly/AP hide caption

Martin Luther King Jr. makes his last public appearance, at the Mason Temple in Memphis, Tenn., on April 3, 1968. The following day, King was assassinated on his motel balcony.

The haunting words, in which King says, "I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you" have led many people to think he was prophesying his own death the following day at the hands of assassin James Earl Ray .

"The speech really does feel a bit like his own eulogy," says Eig. "He's talking about earthly salvation and heavenly salvation. And, in the end, boldly equating himself with Moses, who doesn't live to see the Promised Land."

The speech is largely, if not entirely, extemporaneous. And by the end, King was exhausted, says Carson. "It's pretty clear when you watch the film that he's not in the best shape."

"He barely makes it to the end," he says.

"But he relied on his audience to bring him along," Carson says. "I think it's one of those speeches where the crowd is inspiring him and he's inspiring them. That's what makes it work."

It's a great speech, made greater still because it was his last, says Calloway-Thomas.

"You have this wonderful man who epitomized the social and political situation in the United States in the 20th century," she says. "There he is, dying so tragically and dreadfully. It has a lot of pity and pathos buried inside it."

• Black History Month
• Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
• Civil Rights Movement
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Obstacles remain as women seek more leadership roles in America’s Black Church

The Associated Press

April 28, 2024, 8:41 AM

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No woman had ever preached the keynote sermon at the Joint National Baptist Convention, a gathering of four historically Black Baptist denominations representing millions of people.

That changed in January when the Rev. Gina Stewart took the convention stage in Memphis, Tennessee, — the Southern city home to Christ Missionary Baptist Church where she serves as senior pastor — and delivered a rousing message, asserting that Jesus not only included women in his ministry , but identified with their suffering.

But what happened next put a spotlight on the obstacles women in Christian ministry continue to face as they carve out leadership space within the patriarchal culture of the Black Church in America. Several women pastors told The Associated Press that it should serve as the breaking point.

“This is an example of no matter how high you rise as a woman, you’re going to meet patriarchy at the top of the hill,” said Martha Simmons, founder of Women of Color in Ministry, which helps women navigate the process of getting ordained. “The next Norton Anthology of African American preaching is probably 20 years away, but that sermon will be in there.”

Despite the enthusiastic reception for Stewart, the original recording of her historic sermon disappeared from the convention’s Facebook page, setting off a social media firestorm – driven mostly by women – protesting its removal. A recording of the sermon later appeared, but it was followed by accusations the convention edited her closing remarks, which challenges the four allied denominations to support women in ministry.

National Baptist Convention, USA, President Jerry Young did not reply to requests from The Associated Press for comment. He said at another January meeting that he believed the Facebook page had been hacked and he planned to involve the FBI.

“I still don’t know what happened with the sermon, but what is clear is that this was a form of erasure,” Stewart said. “I was just as shocked, stunned and surprised as everyone else.”

It is symptomatic of a larger problem, according to several Black women pastors interviewed by the AP. They emphasized how they were worn down by the physical and psychological toll of working in a male-dominated culture.

In some denominations, women have made progress. The African Methodist Episcopal Church estimates that one-fourth of its total staff are women, including 1,052 ordained ministers.

In the Black Church as a whole, male pastors predominate, though there’s no comprehensive gender breakdown. Simmons estimates that less than one in 10 Black Protestant congregations are led by a woman, even as more Black women are attending seminary.

The conditions aren’t new, but the public discourse over women’s equality in ministry has rapidly gained ground due in large part to the bullhorn social media provides, said Courtney Pace, scholar-in-residence with Memphis-based Equity for Women in the Church. Pace noted how Facebook afforded Eboni Marshall Turman a venue to publicly share her grievances before filing a gender discrimination lawsuit in December against Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York.

The late theologian and civil rights activist Prathia Hall underscores this dynamic, said Pace, who wrote “Freedom Faith: The Womanist Vision of Prathia Hall.” In the book, she details how Hall was a key inspiration for Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

“The kind of thing that happened to Gina Stewart happened a lot to Prathia Hall,” Pace said. “When she was doing her work, we did not have social media, or cell phones with voice recorders and cameras in every hand. So who knows what the response to Prathia would have been with an empowered public like we have today.”

Hall was born in Philadelphia in 1940, the daughter of a Baptist preacher. As a youth, she took part in local speech competitions where she melded folk religion and liberation theology.

But not all of Hall’s relationships within the insular preaching fraternity of the National Baptist Convention were as collegial as her relationship with King, whom she said in later years did more with “I have a dream” than she could have.

Many theologically conservative Christian churches, including some Black Protestant denominations, prohibit women from preaching. They frequently cite certain biblical passages, including one they interpret as saying women ought to “be silent” in churches. Even in denominations without explicit bans, women with leadership aspirations often must contend with a patriarchal culture.

Last month, the audience was dotted with young Black women at an event hosted at the Howard Divinity School in Washington. A group convened a panel about the evolution of Black women’s role in the church.

Inside the cavernous Dunbarton Chapel that Howard Divinity shares with the Howard School of Law, a half-dozen Black women representing a range of independent churches and Black Protestant denominations spoke about persevering through instability and transition.

Their current duties, some of the women said, left them exhausted and unable to grieve the members they lost to COVID-19.

One speaker was the Rev. Lyvonne Briggs. In 2019, she was being overworked and underpaid as an assistant pastor of a large Baptist church in California. Her marriage dissolved.

She restarted her life in Atlanta. During the lockdown one Sunday morning in her apartment, Briggs went live on Instagram and held a self-styled worship space for 25 people to share their experiences. It became known as The Proverbial Experience, which Briggs describes as an “African-centered, womanist series of spiritual gatherings to nourish the soul.”

In two years, Briggs grew her church into a digital community of 3,000. She also wrote “Sensual Faith: The Spiritual Art of Coming Back to Your Body,” a treatise on liberation from the sexual politics and objectification of Black women’s bodies in the church setting.

“I don’t ascribe to this idea that the Black Church is dead,” Briggs told the AP. “But I do acknowledge and promote that we have to eulogize what it used to be so that we can birth something new.”

One preacher who fashions himself an expert on the topic of women’s role in the church, Walter Gardner of the Newark Church of Christ in Newark, N.J, sent a video link of one of his lectures when queried by the AP about his beliefs. At the end of one session, Gardner suggested that women, overall, ignore Scripture and are incapable of being taught.

That’s a mindset Gina Stewart would like to change, on behalf of future generations of Black women.

“I would hope that we can knock down some of those barriers so that their journey would be just a little bit easier,” said Stewart, who has continued to charge forward.

In a given week, her preaching schedule can take her to multiple cities. As an example, she traveled to Washington earlier this month after accepting a sought-after invitation to preach at Howard University’s Andrew Rankin Memorial Chapel.

Stewart’s goals mesh with those of Eboni Marshall Turman, who gave the Martin Luther King Jr. Crown Forum lecture in February at Martin Luther King’s alma mater, Morehouse College . In December, after not being named a finalist, she had sued Abyssinian Baptist Church and its pulpit search committee for gender discrimination over its hiring process for its next senior pastor, an assertion the church and the committee disputed. No woman has ever held the post.

A former Abyssinian assistant minister, the Rev. Rashad Raymond Moore, said in an email to The Associated Press that of the several dozen applicants for the senior pastor job, “none were more exciting, promising and refreshing than Eboni Marshall Turman.”

Added Moore, who now is pastor of New York City’s First Baptist Church of Crown Heights, “Pastoral searches in Black congregations, historically socially conservative, are often mired in the politics of discrimination, including biases based on gender, sexual orientation, marital status and age.”

Marshall Turman, a Yale Divinity School professor, offered pointed critiques in her first book at what she deemed the inherent patriarchy of Morehouse’s social gospel justice tradition. She adapted her recent lecture’s title from the last speech ever given by King, the all-male college’s most famous alumni.

The title was blunt: “I’m Not Fearing Any Man.”

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

Copyright © 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, written or redistributed.

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In honor of Martin Luther King, Morehouse should rescind Biden's invitation to speak

Amid growing discontent about America funding Israel’s bombing of Gaza, President Joe Biden is set to give the commencement speech at Morehouse College on May 19. Morehouse, a 157-year-old historically Black college in Atlanta, extended the invitation to Biden in September, the month before Hamas launched a deadly attack in Israel and took hostages. But news of the president’s scheduled address wasn’t announced until last week, when anti-war protesters on college campuses across the country were demonstrating against Israel’s brutal response in Gaza . Morehouse’s announcement that Biden would be giving the school’s commencement address justifiably ignited anger among students, staff and alumni.

Morehouse’s announcement that Biden would be giving the school’s commencement address justifiably ignited anger among students, staff and alumni.

During an April 23 town hall with Morehouse President David Thomas, students expressed concern about Biden not only being the speaker, but also receiving an honorary degree from the institution. “How are you going to justify what you’re going to bestow on [Biden] on our behalf when he’s basically a war criminal at this point?” one student asked in reference to the honorary degree.

“I want to know if you’ve been paid to provide Biden a platform to address the student body,” another student asked, a claim Thomas forcefully denied. “I have not been paid. I have not been bought,” Thomas responded. “That question is an insult, but because you are a student here, I owe you the opportunity to do it. But I’m going to call it out.”

This country’s historically Black colleges and universities have long been bastions of protest . For decades, HBCU students have risked everything from expulsion to incarceration to fight for social justice and to stand for the oppressed. Many Black Americans, these Morehouse students included, see a clear connection between Black people’s plight in the United States and the plight of the Palestinian people in Gaza. That makes Thomas’ vow not to replace Biden as the commencement speaker even more upsetting.

“I’ve spoken with several faculty members who say under no conditions are they going to sit on a stage with Joe Biden,” Andrew Douglas, a political science professor at Morehouse, told NBC News . “It’s on everybody’s mind,” he said. Douglas, who’s been at Morehouse for 13 years, joined 14 other members of the faculty council in writing a letter to Thomas expressing their disappointment at the school’s choice to bring Biden to campus at such a fraught moment.

In a separate letter to Thomas, obtained by The Associated Press , some Morehouse alumni refer to Martin Luther King Jr., a Nobel Peace Prize-winning alumnus of Morehouse. “In inviting President Biden to campus,” those alumni wrote, “the college affirms a cruel standard that complicity in genocide merits no sanction from the institution that produced one of the towering advocates for nonviolence of the twentieth century.” King, who embraced nonviolence as a political strategy, won the award in 1964 for his civil rights advocacy, but he said winning the peace prize was “a commission” that compelled him to oppose the Vietnam War in particular and “militarism” generally .

“If the college cannot affirm this noble tradition of justice by rescinding its invitation to President Biden, then the college should reconsider its attachment to Dr. King,” those alumni wrote.

Some current students agree, with one telling The Guardian it’s “absolutely unacceptable” for an HBCU that “prides itself on social justice” to invite a president whose administration supports, to an extent, the war in Gaza, to their campus. However, Provost Kendrick Brown told NBC News that having Biden speak “is something that is in line with Morehouse’s mission and also with this objective of being a place that allows for engagement of social justice issues and moral concerns.”

Morehouse’s attempt to connect this invitation to the college’s storied history of encouraging protest is both bewildering and disingenuous.

He added, “We certainly encourage our students, our faculty, our staff, to form strong opinions and to come together peacefully and engage in that. So the way I see this is, this is certainly an opportunity … for our community to engage with the president to express the range of views that exist on the present issues, certainly in Israel and Gaza.”

One hopes Biden will be open to hearing concerns about Gaza from Black students, a constituency essential to his re-election campaign. But Morehouse’s attempt to connect this invitation to the college’s storied history of encouraging protest is both bewildering and disingenuous. Holding on to the choice of Biden as speaker also defies the will of some students — many of whom attend college to better understand their place in the world — and some faculty, who are tasked with guiding those students toward that understanding and toward their purpose.

In the 1960s, students at multiple HBCUs, including Morehouse , were integral to the fight to desegregate public and private facilities and increase access to the ballot box. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a historic collective of activists, was formed at a conference at Shaw University, while students from Bennett College (my HBCU) and North Carolina A&T were the architects of a sit-in movement that spread to colleges across the country.

That spirit of protest hasn’t died; in fact, as multiple social issues have presented themselves, HBCU students have risen to the occasion. As the #MeToo movement  gained prominence, students at Spelman College, which shares the Atlanta University Center campus with Clark Atlanta University and Morehouse, protested the school’s treatment of sexual assault survivors, leading to the formation of an anti-assault task force. After a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer fatally shot Michael Brown in 2014, HBCU students across the country, Atlanta students included, protested the killing and a grand jury’s decision not to indict that officer.

Of course HBCU students , who believe it is important to face injustice head on, would be organizing pro-Palestinian marches. In fact, doing so aligns with what HBCU students, myself included, have been taught: You don’t just need to find a career, as the late Howard University graduate Chadwick Boseman said during his commencement speech there in 2018; you should find a purpose, one that transcends a paycheck.

If that purpose includes fighting for social justice — as it should and as so many HBCU students and alumni pride themselves on — then why would Morehouse students stay quiet when their school’s administration invites Biden to step into their sacred space and deliver a commencement speech right now?

Why would Morehouse students stay quiet when their school’s administration invites Biden to step into their sacred space and deliver a commencement speech right now?

Ziora Ajeroh, a student at North Carolina A&T who started the school’s first chapter of Dissenters, an anti-war youth organization, told Reckon , “As Black people, we aren’t new to violence. We’ve experienced violence our whole lives and for generations. So when other people are experiencing violence, we feel it’s our duty to stand in solidarity with them and not because they have also stood in solidarity with us, but because it’s the right thing to do.”

There are Dissenters chapters on other HBCU campuses, including Hampton University and Xavier University of Louisiana, demanding that their college presidents issue statements calling for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza. Thus far, no HBCU has risen to that challenge, but with a tradition that includes training activists to change the literal course of history, I am hopeful that Morehouse and other colleges will heed that call.

While the aggrieved Morehouse students, faculty and alumni have not made such a public demand — the goal is that the invitation to Biden be rescinded — may the president respond to their discontent by standing up for innocent people in Gaza and refusing to fund the bombs that are killing them.

Evette Dionne is a culture journalist, critic and editor who writes extensively about pop culture as it relates to race, gender and size. "Lifting as We Climb: Black Women’s Battle for the Ballot Box," her middle-grade nonfiction book, was nominated for a National Book Award and won a Coretta Scott King Honor award. Her forthcoming book, "Weightless," is being released by Ecco in December. 

The 5 pieces of advice Rainn Wilson from ‘The Office’ gave during his Utah graduation speech

The actor known for playing dwight schrute spoke to students about happiness, love and community — plus dungeons and dragons..

(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Celebrity Rainn Wilson quotes from the TV series “The Office” at the beginning of his commencement address at the graduation ceremonies at Weber State University in Ogden on Friday, April 26, 2024.

In a commencement speech full of humor, heart and plenty of “that’s what she said” jokes, actor Rainn Wilson shared with graduates on Friday his secrets for happiness — or what he referred to as advice for “not ending up like a grumpy old jerk face.”

Wilson walked to the podium at Weber State University ’s ceremony to roaring cheers and shouts of “We love you, Dwight.” The celebrity, best known for his role as the uptight assistant to the regional manager Dwight Schrute in the TV show “The Office,” returned that fervor in full.

“Blood alone moves the wheels of history,” he yelled, throwing his fist in the air. The audience screamed in excitement at the reference, from an episode where the character Dwight gives a speech upon winning paper salesman of the year and ends up being tricked into quoting a dictator.

“Wait. No, no, no, stop,” Wilson joked from the stage at the Ogden school. “What am I thinking? That’s terrible, quoting from a long canceled television show. Dwight Schrute quoting Jim Halpert quoting Benito Mussolini of all people.”

He clarified for the crowd of students in purple gowns filling the rows of seats of arena and snapping photos of him with their phones: “This isn’t Dwight’s speech. This is Rainn’s speech.”

Setting aside concerns about identify theft, it was a romping combination of both the actor and the role that’s come to define him, alongside his work as an author and advocate.

“I have something much bigger and better in store for you,” he said, laughing before the punchline. “That’s what she said.”

It was announced last month that Wilson was selected to speak at the Utah graduation — landing as one of the biggest names and most expensive to ever be contracted for a commencement ceremony at a public college or university in the state.

Weber State said students wanted someone memorable and agreed to pay $125,000 for a 20-minute speech from Wilson . Initially, 70% of that was covered by an anonymous donor, and the school shuffled funds to cover the rest. But after the details of the contract were published by The Salt Lake Tribune, another donor stepped forward to pay for the remainder of the cost, according to a spokesperson for the college.

The actor was awarded an honorary doctorate degree by the university. Wilson, dressed in a black graduation gown, looked out over the crowd and mouthed, “I’m a doctor now!” Then he patted the Weber State trustee on the head who handed him the framed diploma.

(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Celebrity Rainn Wilson reacts as he receives an honorary degree during the graduation ceremonies at Weber State University in Ogden on Friday, April 26, 2024.

In his address, Wilson spoke about the challenges he’s faced in his career, his own mental health struggles and how he’s learned to “overcome and navigate” it all. For every show like “The Office,” he said, he’s done a dozen other pilots or projects that never got off the ground. At times, he battled depression, loneliness, addiction and “the granddaddy of them all: anxiety.”

To power through, he said, he relied on love, altruism, community and hope.

He quoted Martin Luther King Jr. and Rumi and E.M. Forster, alongside references to hippies and SpongeBob.

It was the actor’s first-ever graduation speech, he noted. He’s given best man speeches and award show speeches and locker room speeches. “That was a little bit awkward because I wasn’t on the team,” he joked. “I didn’t even play lacrosse. I just happened to walk into the locker room with my shirt off.”

He said he was initially unsure what to impart “to 4,000 brilliant graduating Wildcats, and a couple hundred other idiot Wildcats who really shouldn’t be able to graduate at this ceremony. You know who you are.” Weber State President Brad Mortensen chuckled from his seat behind the actor.

Wilson distilled his thoughts into five pieces of advice. And he ended up speaking for more time than his contract required. It lasted seven minutes longer than expected. That’s what she said.

Here are Wilson’s takeaways for living a happy and meaningful life.

1. “Gather a bouquet of virtues.”

Wilson joked that there are two types of senior citizens: those who are sweet and wise and those who are mean and grumpy. He told students to live in a way that would shape them into the former.

To do that, he said, the graduates should embrace kindness, humility, honesty, wisdom — what he referred to as “spiritual virtues.”

“Picture each virtue as a flower in a bouquet,” Wilson said. “Compassion is a rose. Love is a lily.”

Life, he said, should be focused on each person acquiring those qualities and flexing them like muscles in the gym. “Instead of leg day, have one day be compassion day,” he said.

When you get old, he told students, those bouquets of qualities will be all that’s left. “When we die, we don’t take with us our Teslas or our Xboxes.”

2. Become “other-centered.”

Wilson said the devil is “not a creature with a pitchfork,” but rather the human ego. It pushes you to put yourself first, pushes you to compare yourself to others, pushes you to doubt yourself.

“Rainn, your speech sucks. Utah hates you,” he joked, imitating the voice in his head. “This hat looks stupid. And your head looks like a giant melon. But at least I’m a better speaker than John Krasinski. What an idiot.”

He referred to the psychologist Dr. Martin Seligman who did a study with his students. He started by having them take a survey to measure their happiness. Then, he instructed them to spend a weekend having the most fun they could think of. The students went shopping, partied and played video games. When they came back to class and took the same survey, their happiness scores had gone down.

The next weekend, Seligman instructed the students to be of service to someone else — visit a sick relative or “watch ‘The Office’ with a depressed friend,” Wilson suggested. They took the survey once again. Their scores increased and stayed higher longer.

“Selfishness doesn’t work,” Wilson concluded. He told graduates to walk out the doors of the arena after the ceremony and find a way to serve others.

3. “Live like it’s Dungeons and Dragons.”

Young people today, Wilson said, are battling heightened levels of mental health issues. And much of it, he attributes to social media and phones. “They separate us from each other,” he continued. “… They give the illusion of connection, but in reality they disconnect us.”

He said one solution is clear to him: Dungeons and Dragons, the role-playing fantasy game where players craft their own storylines.

“It’s a group of people on a mission, working together, elbow to elbow, without any devices or screens,” Wilson said. “They’re playing, laughing and most importantly slaying orcs and gathering treasure.”

The actor joked that it didn’t actually have to be that game — though it helped him as a teenager — but could be anything where you are present, connect with people and “put your d--- phones away.”

He quoted George Vaillant, an American psychiatrist, who said: “The only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.” Wilson told the graduates to lean on the friendships and connections they made at Weber State.

(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) An attendee records celebrity Rainn Wilson as he delivers the commencement address at the graduation ceremonies at Weber State University in Ogden on Friday, April 26, 2024.

4. “Devote yourself to love.”

“What keeps you from living in maximum love all time, like Jesus, like the Dalai Lama, like SpongeBob?” Wilson asked the crowd. “… Fear is one reason. Fear is the opposite of love.”

He encouraged those in the audience to drop their guards, turn toward each other and “express warmth” to those around them — through eye contact, handshakes, hugs and high fives.

One member of Weber State’s board of trustees jumped up from his seat on the stage to share warmth with Wilson — by smooching him on the cheek.

“What a Wildcat,” Wilson said, appearing surprised and laughing.

He then mentioned that the graduates should show love whenever they can — to anyone and everyone, regardless of their differences in race and gender and religion.

The actor referred to the Pando aspen grove in central Utah. It looks like multiple trees, but it is all one organism.

“It’s right here in your backyard,” he said. “I’m not joking. It’s in Fish Lake, Utah. Google it if you don’t believe me.”

Wilson said that should be an example that we’re the same, as humans, and should love each other. “We might look like a few thousand graduates and one incredibly handsome commencement speaker,” he said, “but we’re all one.”

5. “Keep hope alive.”

Wilson recalled a story where he was talking to his acting teacher about being depressed and sad about the world. The teacher grabbed Wilson by the arm and said, “Don’t. Don’t do it. You can’t be cynical. You can’t be pessimistic. If you do, then they win.”

Without hope, Wilson said, “you’ll just sit on your couch and not do anything.”

Hope is what changes the world, he believes. Hope and love and community and giving and virtue, and yes, some humor, too. And that’s what he said.

(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Celebrity Rainn Wilson holds up the "W" sign with his hands after he delivers the commencement address at the graduation ceremonies at Weber State University in Ogden on Friday, April 26, 2024.

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Remarks by President   Biden at a Campaign Event | Philadelphia,   PA

Martin Luther King Jr. Recreation Center Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

1:47 P.M. EDT

THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you.  Please, have a seat if you have one.  (Laughter.) Mom and Dad, I hope you were listening.  (Laughter.) 

What an incredible honor.  What an incredible honor.  I don’t want to become emotional, but what an incredible honor to have the support of the Kennedy family. John White Jr., thanks for those kind words and for carrying on your family’s civil rights legacy.  And so is your son Kellan, who — who’s doing a hell of a job on our campaign.  (Applause.)  He’s helping us win Pennsylvania.  (Applause.)

Kerry, I — that was — that was the most meaningful introduction I’ve ever gotten in my life, other than when my sister introduced me.  And I want to thank you for your friendship, well beyond the introduction. It’s an incredible honor to receive the endorsement of your family.  And it means so much to me. 

Your mom, Ethel, whom I spoke with on the phone a couple weeks ago — well, I guess, last week — to wish her happy birthday, she’s always been so gracious to my family during the most difficult time of my life.  She’s done so much for the country and the world in her own right. 

And, of course, your dad, who I never got to meet — I just missed — he was a senator from Syra- — from New York.  He came up to Syracuse University and spoke, and I waited in line, but I didn’t get a chance to physically meet him.  I never got — but he inspired me.  And his passion and courage inspired my generation. 

Like millions of Americans, I remember that night on April 4th, 1968.  I was finishing law school at Syracuse University when we heard Dr. King had been assassinated.  The pain and the outrage sparked riots and despair all across the country, including in my home state of Delaware. 

And then we heard a familiar voice I’d listened to many times — your dad, Bobby Kennedy, standing in the back of a truck in Indianapolis asking for peace and quoting one of his favorite Greek poets.  He said, and I quote, “Even in our sleep, our pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart until, our own despair — in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” 

I had a hard time to believe that day that there was any wisdom, trying to work out from despair where — where we’d go.

It was even harder to believe just two months later, on June the 5th [6th].  I had just graduated from law school, earned an incredible — and learned about an incredible man, later that night, had been assassinated.  Yet another tragedy in your family and a gigantic tragedy for the country. 

Only two political heroes I had growing up were gone within a month of each other — months of each other. 

We faced a real inflection point as a nation. 

When I returned home to my city of Wilmington, one of the cities — only city since Reconstruction to be occupied by the military, the National Guard, with drawn bayonets on every street corner for nine straight months following Dr. King’s murder. 

When I graduated that summer, I went home to take a job at one of the oldest law firms in the state.  But after only a matter of months, I left that law firm and took a job as a public defender because I wanted to be more engaged in the effort. 

I went on to run for the county council, for the United States Senate, and then as Vice President of the United States.  I’ve done so in large part because I thought that’s something your dad would have done. I’m not — I’m not exaggerating that.  He’s always been on my mind, been one of my heroes.  

Today, I sit behind the Resolute Desk, where President John F. Kennedy once sat.  And as I look from the desk — if you’ve ever taken a tour of the White House, I sit in that desk and I look — in front of the fireplace, to the left is a bust of Martin Luther King and to the right is a bust of your dad.  And I remember to keep — keep looking and remind myself what they would do in tough calls.  (Applause.)

The principles Bobby Kennedy embodied were principles taught by my grandparents and parents around our kitchen table.  And that’s not hyperbole; that’s a fact.  My dad said everyone is entitled to be treated with dignity and respect, no matter what their station — no matter what.  

And they thought — I was taught the worst sin of all — I mean this from the bottom of my heart — the worst sin of all was the abuse of power — physical power, economic power, or psycholo- — that was the worst sin of all — abusing power.  (Applause.)  

And then we have an obligation to each other: to leave no one behind, to give hate no safe harbor. 

It’s up to all of us to preserve and protect the very idea of America. 

You know, we’re unique — we’re in unique in America — in world history.  We’re the only nation founded on an idea.  Every other nation in the world is founded on geography, ethnicity, race, religion — except us.  Think about it.  The idea was, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal,” in the image of God, and deserve to be treated equally throughout their lives.  (Applause.)

We’ve never fully lived up to it, but we’ve never walked away from it.  We’ve never walked from it.  And we’re not going to walk away from it now.  (Applause.)  

Today, we face another inflection point in history.

The 2024 election is about two fundamentally different visions of — for America.  Donald Trump’s vision is one of anger, hate, revenge, and retribution.  He embraces the insurrectionists of January the 6th.  He’s running on it.  And as mentioned already, he promised to be a dictator on “day one” — his own words.  And he calls for —

AUDIENCE:  Booo —

THE PRESIDENT:  No, he — you know he means it.  And he calls for another “bloodbath” when he loses again.  (Applause.)

Look, your family, the Kennedy family, has endured such violence.  Denying January 6th and whitewashing what happens is absolutely outrageous.

I have a very different view of America, one of hope and optimism, like I hope all of you do — optimism that Bobby Kennedy embodied. 

I see an America where we defend democracy, not diminish it.  I see an America where we protect our freedoms, not take them away.  And I see an America where the economy grows from the middle out and the bottom up — and that way, the middle class does well and the poor have a shot — and where healthcare is a right, not a privilege.  (Applause.)

By the way, all the stuff we’ve done so far — we’ve done it, and guess what?  We’ve cut the budget by a lot of money: $172 billion so far.  So, don’t tell me it can’t be done.  (Applause.)

I see a future where the planet — we save the planet — as this guy is busting his neck doing — from climate change, literally — the climate crisis in — in America.

And we’ve got to do something — the idea we send our kids to school teaching them to duck and cover.  Think about that.  The idea, in the United States of America, (inaudible) duck and cover at school.  More kids being killed by gun violence than almost anything else.

Folks, the America we’re building is significantly different.  We’re going to get it done.  And now, it’s time to keep going and not slow down, because there is so much at stake.  

Let me close with this.  I know Bobby Kennedy liked Greek poets, and they’re great, but I prefer Irish poets.  (Laughter.)  And that’s not a joke, unfortunately.  (Laughter.)  My colleagues used to always kid me for quoting Irish poets on the floor of the Senate.  They thought I did it because I’m Irish.  That’s not the reason.  They’re the best poets in the world.  (Laughter.)

The one I enjoy particularly is Seamus Heaney.  He wrote a poem called “The Cure at Troy” that reminds me of the courage of Bobby Kennedy, and I mean this from the bottom of my heart.  And it goes like this, one stanza.  It says, “History teaches us do not hope on this side of the grave.  But then, once in a lifetime, that longed-for tidal wave of justice will rise up, and hope and history rhyme.”

In 2024, we have a chance to make hope and history rhyme again.  Are you ready to do that with me?  (Applause.)

Are you ready to move forward, not back?  (Applause.)

Are you ready to choose unity over division, dignity over demolition, and choose truth over lies?  (Applause.)  Are you ready to choose freedom over [and] democracy?  Because that’s America.  (Applause.)

Folks, I’ve been doing this a long — I know I only look like I’m 40, but I’ve been doing this a long time.  (Laughter.)  But I’ve never been more optimistic about our future, and I mean it. 

We just have to remember who we are.  We’re the United States of America.  There is nothing — I mean this sincerely.  Think about it.  We’re the only nation in the world — as a student of history, I can say — that’s come out of ever crisis stronger than we went in. 

There’s nothing — nothing beyond our capacity when we do it together.

God bless you all.  And may God protect our troops.

Thank you.  (Applause.)

AUDIENCE:  Four more years!  Four more years!  Four more years!

 1:58 P.M. EDT

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Sharon Kennedy: What is a true evangelist?

For a long time now we’ve been hearing about a group of Christians we didn’t pay much attention to because they rarely made the news. They were known as “evangelists” and according to tradition, their purpose in life was to “evangelize.” In other words, they were expected to be busy spreading the good news of the gospel to people who did not have a personal relationship with Jesus. They went to “holy roller” churches, sang loudly, spoke in tongues and were filled with compassion for those they considered lost.

Then they met DJT and a new breed of evangelists was born. Trump became their main project. It’s obvious why. If ever there was a flawed man who needed love, forgiveness and guidance, it was the Donald. His lack of repentance over a multitude of sins, his course language, his foul mouth when talking about women, his shady business dealings, all this and much more made him a prime target for evangelists. They wanted to save him, but salvation was soon forgotten and idolatry took its place when he tickled their ears. It was an opportunity too tempting to resist. They flocked to him as chickens flock to cracked corn on a winter’s day.

But poultry farmers know that corn is rich in carbohydrates and must be fed in moderation. So too, evangelism only works when the message is administered in small doses, and the sinner is receptive and ready to repent. I was once a holy roller and know how easy it is to leap from being a moderate Bible thumper to a gluttonous hog who has lost all sense of direction and goes overboard. Trump shunned confession, further endearing himself to white evangelists who forgot or simply overlooked his moral transgressions. They were waiting for a Messiah figure and believed they had found one.

I’ve listened to media commentators who can’t understand why Trump has been and continues to be such a big hit with the church-goers. Even a casual reading of the Scriptures will give the answer. In the New Testament, Jesus always chose to champion the least likely candidates. He didn’t ask bankers or stockbrokers to be his apostles. He selected fishermen to make them “fishers of men.” He chose to dine with tax collectors, to defend prostitutes and to chastise a woman who was busy preparing a meal instead of sitting at his feet. He berated a man who violently cut off the ear of a soldier who was arresting him.

It’s hardly worth debating whether Martin Luther King Jr. had a closer walk with Jesus than Donald John Trump. King promoted peaceful demonstrations. He didn’t fan the flames of unrest until they became a fire threatening to engulf our nation. King said he had seen the promised land but might not get there with his people. He didn’t say his people were Democrats or Republicans, Mexicans or Chinese, gay or straight. His speeches were powerful and emotional but void of threats of retaliation against those who detested him and all of his supporters.

Take a minute and read the passion of Christ found in the four gospels. It will refresh your memory of Barabbas, the convict the crowd chose to free over Jesus. Is it any wonder the MAGAs selected Trump as their candidate over Republicans better qualified and mentally stable? Does his base really believe he’s being persecuted so they won’t be? I’d say such an outlandish statement smacks of blasphemy more than martyrdom, and any true evangelist or follower of Christ would agree. Don’t be fooled by a generic con man. You’ll regret it.

— To contact Sharon Kennedy, send her an email at [email protected] . Kennedy's new book, "View from the SideRoad: A Collection of Upper Peninsula Stories," is available from her or Amazon.