“I Have a Dream”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., used the same rhetorical device in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech1. Here are some excerpts (emphasis added) illustrating his argument that the word “all” in the nation’s founding documents included “blacks as well as whites”; just as Paul argued that God’s promises in the law and  the prophets included salvation of Gentiles as well as Jews. Dr. King declared that it was time for those promises to become a reality; just as Paul declared that Jesus Christ had made God’s promises a reality.

“Five score years ago,2a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation.3This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity…4

“So we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was the promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…5

“Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy; now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice; now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood; now is the time to make justice a reality for all God’s children…6

“I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American 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…

“I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places shall be made plain, and the crooked places shall be made straight and the glory of the Lord will be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.7

“This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free some day. This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning—‘my country ‘tis of thee; sweet land of liberty; of thee I sing; land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride; from every mountain side, let freedom ring’8—and if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.

“So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire…Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi, from every mountainside, let freedom ring. And when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and hamlet, from every state and city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children — black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Catholics and Protestants — will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last, free at last; thank God Almighty, we are free at last.’ ”

  1. King delivered this speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963 as the keynote address of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Mrs. Coretta King once commented, “At that moment it seemed as if the Kingdom of God appeared. But it only lasted for a moment.”
  2. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, delivered on November 19, 1863, begins, “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, con­ceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
  3. The Emancipation Proclamation is two executive orders issued by President Lincoln on Sep­tember 22, 1862, and January 1, 1863, respectively.
  4. C.F.Psalm 30:5.
  5. The U.S. Declaration of Independence contains the words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
  6. The U.S. Pledge of Allegiance avows: “I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
  7. Isaiah 40:4, 5.
  8. “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” by Samuel Francis Smith, 1832.