To “cash a check”: The Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and Clarence B. The notion of the exile points to Exodus - when the Jews lived in exile - and an allegory that King evokes throughout “I Have a Dream.” In this speech, though, the single man on the “lonely island of poverty” harks back to John Donne’s renowned poem, “No Man Is An Island.” King, who wrote of the “paralyzing chains of conformity” in his pivotal “ Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” also referred to “twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty” in that letter. Wells, who also alluded to the lyrics of the patriotic song “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” (“America”). Frederick Douglass did so in his oft-repeated historic speech “ The Meaning of of July Fourth for the Negro.” King’s link to Douglass is even more fundamental, points out Arizona State University English professor Keith Miller, author of “Voices of Deliverance.” Douglass “basically uses the Bible and the Declaration of Independence to indict slavery.” Other speakers who linked the Bible with America’s founding documents included journalist and suffragist Ida B. Abolitionists long evoked the images of chains to depict slavery’s dehumanizing nature. This passage packs in several key literary influences. With the help of Stanford University’s King Papers Project, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, and “ Voice of Deliverance” author Keith Miller, the following is an examination of key passages in “I Have a Dream” and a look at the historic origins that shaped them. It is one of the finest speeches delivered on American soil - the distillation of Old Testament wisdom, Shakespearean drama, the Founding Fathers’ vision, and King’s own sermons and his emergent understanding of what it meant to be free, equal, and American. Martin Luther King Jr.’s words in “I Have a Dream.” The speech was an afterthought, one that King crafted in the final hours before the momentous convocation, working its rhythms like a poem. Yet all this has been submerged into the backdrop to Dr.
More than 22,000 police officers, guards, soldiers, and paratroopers were placed on alert. Attendant celebrities lent their Hollywood credentials. 28, 1963, a quarter of a million people peaceably gathered at the Lincoln Memorial for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
Aerial view of the 1963 March on Washington, looking north from the Washington Monument.