The "I Have A Dream" Speech
About Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. Civil rights speech at the Lincoln Memorial, 28 August 1963:
““The speech itself is redolent of the phrasing and cadences of the Bible and the pulpit, from its opening — the deliberately archaic ‘Five score years ago’, which purposely echoes Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. It creates a picture of an America that is failing to live up to its promise as a New Jerusalem, as a home for all of ‘God’s children’. King dramatized ‘a shameful condition’ of African Americans, ‘on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity’, in terms of economic need, of constitutional obligations towards them, of a battle against unjust laws and unjust law-enforcers. As he built to his climax - a vision of racial equality — he reached further into Old Testament imagery and New World idealism to create a landscape of ‘prodigious hills’ and ‘mighty mountains’, where ‘one day every valley shall be exalted’ and the ‘crooked places will be made straight’. It remains a rhetorical triumph.” ”
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