I Have a Dream: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Biblical Prophetic Speech

This is the name commonly given to this speech. The original typed version of the speech lacked any references to a dream (see https://freedomsring.stanford.edu/?view=Speech , which allows you to compare the written and the oral versions), and was called, “Normalcy – Never Again.” For King’s early biography, leading up to this speech, see Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–63 (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1988). King extensively used the dream motif first in an earlier speech, on November 27, 1962, nine months before speaking at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, a bit more than 60 miles east of Duke (see here). The endings of these two speeches are nearly identical. I would like to thank Professor W. Jason Miller, Professor of English at NC State University, for sharing an annotated copy of this speech with me; see his discussion of the speech in his, W. Jason Miller, Origins of the Dream: Hughes’s Poetry and King’s Rhetoric (Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 2015), 160–175. The repetition of “I have a dream” was likely borrowed from the womanist preacher, Prathia Hall; see Courtney Pace, Freedom Faith: The Womanist Vision of Prathia Hall (Athens, GA: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2019), 221–234.

As noted here, James Reston, writing for The New York Times, said after the speech: “Dr. King touched all the themes of the day, only better than anybody else. He was full of the symbolism of Lincoln and Gandhi, and the cadences of the Bible. He was both militant and sad, and he sent the crowd away feeling that the long journey had been worthwhile.”

David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (NY: Vintage, 1988), 284. As noted by J. Robert Cox, “The Fulfillment of Time: King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech (August 28, 1963),” Texts in Context: Critical Dialogues on Significant Episodes in American Political Rhetoric 9 (2006): 181–204, it is surprising that this speech has hardly been analyzed extensively from a rhetorical perspective. Cox, in his analysis, emphasizes the temporal movement of the speech. This is extended in Robert Hariman, “Time and the Reconstitution of Gradualism in King’s Address: A Response to Cox,” ibid., 205–218. The best treatment of King’s rhetoric is W. Jason Miller, Origins of the Dream; the scope of that book is much broader than its title suggests. It also contains useful discussions, with extensive references, to King within the African American preaching tradition.

In this short piece, I cannot be thorough. This speech has not been subject to a comprehensive analysis, especially of its biblical roots; an early and helpful broad analysis of it is in Hortense J. Spillers, “Martin Luther King and the Style of the Black Sermon,” The Black Scholar 3/1 (Sept 1971): 24–26.

For more in King’s use of biblical quotations, see Keith D. Miller, Voice of Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Its Sources (New York: The Free Press, 1992), which contains an excellent index of the verses he cites. For a more cursory discussion of King’s use of the Bible in “I Have a Dream,” see K. A. Hanson, “A Close Textual Analysis of Dr. Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream,” 18–20, available at https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1069&context=comssp .

Miller, Origins of the Dream, 23–24, with references to Keith Miller’s work.

King typically quotes from the King James Bible, which here reads “judgement” rather than “justice.” He may have changed “judgement” to “justice” to better fit the context. In any event, he was quoting from memory and his quotes often differ slightly from the original. This was already one of King’s favorite verses at Crozer; see Patrick Parr, The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 2018), 192. King also cites this verse (using “justice” rather than “judgement”) in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

My citations of the “I Have a Dream” speech are from here, though I have omitted the italics that are sometimes used on this site.

The importance of Deutero-Isaiah for King is appreciated by Keith D. Miller, “Second Isaiah Lands in Washington, DC: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’ as Biblical Narrative and Biblical Hermeneutic,” Rhetoric Review 26 (2007): 405–424.

With “a joyous daybreak,” King may also be referring to the end of this verse in Psalms:

^{תהלים ל:ו} כִּי רֶגַע בְּאַפּוֹ חַיִּים בִּרְצוֹנוֹ בָּעֶרֶב יָלִין בֶּכִי וְלַבֹּקֶר רִנָּה.

^{Ps 30:5[*6]} For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favour is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.

It is striking, however, that King is not as gender inclusive as Paul, especially given the important role of women in the civil rights movement.

See Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently (NY: HarperOne, 2020), 285–312.

In other contexts, King applied the Suffering Servant image to himself; see Richard Lischer, The Preacher King: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Word That Moved America, updated edition (NY: Oxford University Press, 1997), 188–192.

See David M. Freidenreich, “Food and Table Fellowship,” The Jewish Annotated New Testament, 2nd ed., ed. Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (NY: Oxford Univ. Press, 2017), 650–653.

On the oral preaching style of King, see John H. Patton, “‘I Have a Dream’: The Performance of Theology Fused with the Power of Orality,” in Martin Luther King Jr., and the Sermonic Power of Public Discourse, ed. Carolyn Calloway-Thomas and John Louis Lucaites (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), 105–126. On this speech as “religious,” see James Darsey, The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America (NY: New York University Press, 1997), 126.

I am here invoking Martin Marty’s concept of American civil religion.

These suffuse African American preaching in general; see Kenyatta R. Gilbert, Exodus Preaching: Crafting Sermons about Justice and Hope (Nashville: Abington, 2018), 68, who notes that these sermons “carr[y] an impulse for beauty in its use of language and culture.” These are connected to the musical influences on, and nature of, this preaching; see Luke A. Powery, Dem Dry Bones: Preaching, Death, and Hope (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012), 23–25. Powery also emphasizes the importance of repetition and metaphor, two rhetorical devices I discuss below, in African American preaching (see esp. p. 71, and passim).

Discussions of King’s use of parallelism include Miller, Origins of the Dream, 187, 190.

For a brief summary, see Adele Berlin, “Parallelism,” NIDB 4.379–381.

I agree with James Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and Its History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), that biblical prose and poetry are not opposites, but are on a continuum; this speech of King’s is on that continuum as well, leaning toward poetry. See also Roman Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas Sebeok (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), 350–377, who argues that prose can use poetic devices and that it is the accretion of poetic devices that sets poetry apart from prose. Prose and poetry thus exist on a continuum and are not strictly dichotomous.

Lischer, The Preacher King, 147 (italics in the original).

Older studies refer to synonymous, antithetical, and synthetic parallelism. Although these terms have been critiqued, and are often now avoided in biblical scholarship, they remain useful.

See Miller, Origins of the Dream, 55–81.

See Luis Alonso Schökel, A Manual of Hebrew Poetics, 20–26, 75–83.

But see the partial repetition found in the first two lines of biblical staircase parallelism; see Wilfred G. E. Watson, Classical Hebrew Poetry: A Guide to its Techniques, JSOTSup 26 (Sheffield: JSOT, 1984), 150–158.

The poem also contains assonance, i.e., the repetition of vowels, but this features less prominently than alliteration. Discussions of King’s use of alliteration include Miller, Origins of the Dream, 189.

See Watson, Classical Hebrew Poetry, 225–229. Alliteration also broadly characterizes African American preaching; see e.g., Pace, Freedom Faith, 157.

On his studies, see Lischer, The Preacher King, 30–66; 205–230. On learning some Hebrew from Pritchard at Crozer, see Parr, The Seminarian, 28, confirmed by personal correspondence with the author. A fact for Bible nerds only: When at Crozer, King babysat for the children of Pritchard (Parr, The Seminarian, 31). See Taylor Branch phone interview with James B. Pritchard, June 25 and 29, 1984. Interview notes located at UNC-Chapel Hill's Wilson Library, Folder 703. https://finding-aids.lib.unc.edu/05047/

For biblical examples, see Watson, Classical Hebrew Poetry, 150–156. The importance of anaphora in this speech is noted in Hanson, “A Close Textual Analysis of Dr. Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream,’” 17.

For examples of anaphora in other speeches of King, see Miller, Origins of the Dream, 155–157; and Robert D. Harrison and Linda K. Harrison, “The Call from the Mountaintop: Call-Response and the Oratory of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” in Calloway-Thomas and Lucaites, eds., Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Sermonic Power of Public Discourse, 169–170.

In the Bible as well, it is much rarer than anaphora; see Watson, Classical Hebrew Poetry, 276–277. For King’s use of the epistrophe “Keep going” in an earlier speech, see Miller, Origins of the Dream, 21.

Following the observations of cognitive linguistics, I understand similes as a sub-category as metaphors, and not as a separate figure of speech.

Gilbert, Exodus Preaching, 14–15.

On the jeremiad in general, see David Howard-Pitney, The Afro-American Jeremiad: Appeals for Justice in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), and on King’s use of it, 133–153; on its use in “I Have a Dream,” see Keith Gilyard and Adam J. Banks, On African-American Rhetoric (NY: Routledge, 2018), 33–34.

For an extended analysis of this metaphor see Martha Solomon, “Covenanted Rights: The Metaphoric Matrix of ‘I Have a Dream,’ in Calloway-Thomas and Lucaites, eds., Martin Luther King Jr., and the Sermonic Power of Public Discourse, 66–84.

I have kept the quotation marks, which are noted in the transcription of the oral speech.

On metaphors in King’s speeches, see Spillers, “Martin Luther King and the Style of the Black Sermon,” 14–27, esp. 17; and Lischer, The Preacher King, 118–119.

Merikare, from COS 1.62: “If you are skilled in speech, you will win, The tongue is [a king’s] sword; Speaking is stronger than all fighting, The skillful is not overcome.”

See Keith Miller, Voice of Deliverance, 169–185. This perception explains in part why the exodus motif is so prominent in his work—as a new Moses, he is leading the African American community out of bondage (ibid., 13–28). On King as a prophet, see Lischer, The Preacher King, 178–179. On the association of prophecy and poetry, see Jason Miller, Origins of the Dream, 179. Precisely when King viewed himself as a prophet, and was viewed by others as prophetic, is debated. His teacher at Morehouse, George Dennis Sale Kelsey, saw King as “conducting activities in the finest Mosaic and prophetic tradition” (see here). His strong identification with the Hebrew prophets began already in Crozer Theological Seminary; see Parr, The Seminarian, 192. But as Kenneth L. Smith and Ira G. Zepp, Jr., Search for the Beloved Community: The Thinking of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Valley Forge, PA: Judson, 1974), 14, note, the oft-cited claim that King took a course in Prophets at Crozer is incorrect. But the importance of the prophets in the work of Walter Rauschenbusch did shape King, and they were his most influential biblical texts outside of the Sermon on the Mount (ibid., 37–40).

“Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!” Quoted from here.

I would like to thank Matthew Arakaky, Gay Byron, Lacey Hudspeth, W. Jason Miller, and Patrick Parr for their assistance.