Summary Of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Speech

In Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech, “I Have a Dream,” given at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963, he spoke to gain equality for black men, women, and children in the United States of America. It is as if he came to the same realization that his feminist predecessor, Jane Addams, had come to. She had once said, “The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life” (Bellecci, 2004, p. 39). Martin Luther King knew that he had freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, but he was not getting them in the same way that his white countrymen were getting them and he was willing to do whatever he could to be considered a true, equal American citizen. However, unlike the likes of other black revolutionaries of the time, such as Malcolm X, MLK was an advocate of peaceful protests even as the white people broke out with violence towards the African American community with every step they took in the war for equality. “‘As my sufferings mounted,’ Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote, ‘I soon realized that there were two ways that I could respond to my situation: either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force’” (Bromell, 2013, p.

Despite the growing anger from the African American people and their rising call for violence against white men, a closer observation of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech, “I Have a Dream,” reveals a calm, assertive message to invoke people of all races to join together in a state of peace and