In his “I Have a Dream” speech, minister and civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. outlines the long history of racial injustice in America and encourages his audience to hold their country accountable to its own founding promises of freedom, justice, and equality.
King begins his speech by reminding his audience—the 250,000+ attendees at the March on Washington in August of 1963—that it has been over a century since the Emancipation Proclamation was signed into law, ending slavery in America. But even though Black Americans are technically free from slavery, they are not free in any larger sense—the “chains of discrimination” and the “manacles of segregation” continue to define the Black experience in America. It is time, King argues, for Black Americans to “cash [the] check” they were promised a century ago and demand “the riches of freedom and the security of justice.” There is no more time to waste in pursuit of a gradual solution to racism, King says—it is the “sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent,” and the country has reached its boiling point.
Even though King calls for the “whirlwinds of revolt” to spin into action, he urges those on the front lines of the civil rights movement not to let “bitterness and hatred” define their actions. They cannot to let their movement for justice “degenerate into physical violence.” King reminds his listeners to remain in the “majestic heights” of nonviolent resistance and also to not see their white allies as enemies. In order to bring true justice about, King says, Americans of all races will need to unite and remain true to the values of nonviolent solidarity.
King acknowledges the long and difficult struggles that many of his listeners have already faced—he knows that those involved in the movement for civil rights have been beaten, insulted, and incarcerated. Still, he urges them to return home from the march to wherever they may live, be it in the sweltering South or in the “ghettos of the northern cities,” confident in the value and promise of their fight.
Then King invokes the dream he has for America: a dream that one day the country will “live out the true meaning of its creed” and make it a reality that “all men are created equal.” He dreams that his children will one day live in a society where they will be judged not “by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” and that, in the future, Black children and white children will join hands as sisters and brothers.
King urges his listeners to take their faith in meaningful change back to their hometowns—they must continue to struggle together, face incarceration together, and “stand up for freedom together” in order to truly make America a great nation. He calls for freedom to ring out across the country, from the highest mountains of Colorado, to Stone Mountain of Georgia, to “every hill and molehill of Mississippi.” When America collectively allows freedom to ring across its hills and valleys, he says, only then will “black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Catholics and Protestants” be able to sing truthfully and honestly the words of the old Negro spiritual: “Free at last, free at last; thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”
