![]() ![]() King was a "poet who could take the words of the King James Bible, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and make them uniquely his own," Hansen says.īy the time King thundered "Let freedom ring! Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee," some in the crowd were weeping. People in the front row joined hands and began swaying, says Drew Hansen, author of a new book, The Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr. "I have a dream," King went on, "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. It was probably the greatest moment in his life and the greatest moment in mine." ![]() "I kept getting closer until I must’ve been only seven or eight feet away," he recalls. King, who was only 34, had used the "I have a dream" phrase in other speeches, but never so stirringly or so memorably.īob Adelman, a photographer’s assistant then 32 years old, was near the podium. "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,’ " he said. King, the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, one of five civil rights groups that organized the march, began with prepared remarks noting that "five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation." But deep into his 16-minute address, King began to improvise, drawing on his extraordinary gifts as a preacher. But the world would soon know Martin Luther King, Jr., as the man who awakened the soul of a nation with one of the most important orations in American history. It was August 28, 1963, and many there that day knew the final speaker as an activist who had led groundbreaking civil rights protests in the heart of Dixie. ![]() A quarter of a million people gathered near the Lincoln Memorial in the nation’s capital for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. ![]()
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