(Read this article by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., on pbs.org (originally posted on The Root) for more on how the gospel singer shaped this speech by repeatedly imploring King to tell the crowd about the dream.) Indeed, King himself commented on his decision to go off script later that same year, though he did not mention whether or not he heard Jackson. Or watch the speech here and look for the moment yourself. You can read more about how the speech was written and then improvised here. It’s an example of rhetorical dexterity at its finest. His mesmerizing words and sentence structure were truly delivered extemporaneously. Remarkably, if you read the text of the Detroit event, you’ll see that he did not recite the same sentences word for word. In fact King delivered the now familiar refrain, or at least a version of it, two months earlier at Cobo Hall in Detroit. Improvise means “to deliver without prior preparation.” It does not mean that King completely made up the words on the spot.
King improvised much of the second half of the speech, including the “I have a dream” refrain. He shifted gears in a heartbeat, abandoning whatever final version he’d prepared…he’d given himself over to the spirit of the moment.” Jones leaned over to the person standing next to him and said, “These people out there today don’t know it yet, but they’re about to go to church.” Jones saw King “push the text of his prepared remarks to one side of the lectern. In that brief silence, Mahalia Jackson, a gospel singer and good friend of King’s, shouted “tell ‘em about the ‘dream.’” Few people heard her, with the exception of Jones, Ted Kennedy, and, of course, King. In the seventh paragraph, something extraordinary happened. The story was told in an article in Forbes online in 2013. Jones, tells this story in his book Behind the Dream, written in 2011. While the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., began with prepared remarks, the most well-known part of the speech containing the theme I have a dream was created on Augas King addressed the crowd of over 250,000 on the Mall in Washington, DC. It is the most famous speech in the 20th century by one of the most inspiring orators in our country’s history. Martin Luther King, Jr., August 28, 1963, Washington, DC “I have a dream that 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.
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