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The Abstract

MLK’s First Dream

The rare and inspired delivery of all of his most dramatic endings and the unusual overlap of genres makes this address one of his most unique and historic speeches

The following post was written by Jason Miller, professor of English at NC State and the author of “Origins of the Dream: Hughes’ Poetry and King’s Rhetoric,” which explores the intersections between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the poet Langston Hughes. Here, Miller describes his discovery of an audio recording from a speech delivered by King in Rocky Mount, N.C., on Nov. 27, 1962 that contains the now-famous “I have a dream” phrasing – a full nine months before he used the rhetorical flourish during the March on Washington in August 1963.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. first delivered the now famous refrain “I have a dream” in Rocky Mount, N.C., on Nov. 27, 1962. Dr. King ended his fifty-five minute speech in the Booker T. Washington Gymnasium by invoking the “How Long, Not Long” set-piece he made famous when he spoke from the steps of the capital at the end of the final march in Selma, Alabama on March 25, 1965. He then continued with eight consecutive lines of “I have a dream” before also ending with the “Let Freedom Ring” passage made famous when he spoke on the Mall of Washington on Aug. 28, 1963.

This speech in Rocky Mount is part sermon, part mass meeting, and part civil rights address. The rare and inspired delivery of all of his most dramatic endings and the unusual overlap of genres makes this address one of the most unique and historic speeches ever delivered by the twentieth century’s greatest orator.  Now for the first time, this historic speech can be heard.

Sample a portion of the speech:

Audio Tape

This unknown recording of the speech was digitally restored by one of the world’s leading audio archivists. Philadelphia’s George Blood, a man who has been digitizing music for the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Boston Symphony (among many others), restored this tape to its best original levels to present the speech as it sounded in 1962. George has written the guide for audio restoration used today by the Library of Congress.  Absolutely no overdubs, edits, or changes have been made to this recording in any way.

Though uncertain, the original reel to reel tape was likely recorded by a teacher at the segregated school where Dr. King spoke before over 1,800 people. It was recorded on a 1.5 millimeter acetate reel to reel tape. Once the contents on the reel were located, they were carefully confirmed by playing the tape through a reel to reel player. The tape was then hand delivered to George Blood Audio in Philadelphia. The audio version of the speech here is the only known copy of this historic speech.

Historical Context

George Dudley, the pastor at Mount Zion First Baptist Church, had invited King to speak in Rocky Mount as early as Feb. 21, 1958. At that time, Pastor Dudley wrote that he was trying “to get some new life in our local chapter of the NAACP and get into our people a sense of Citizenship.” He had planned to hold a mass meeting for either March 19, 20, or 21. King was unable to commit to any of these dates in 1958. It is unclear how King came to accept the invitation to appear in 1962.

Just before this speech, King had completed a failed campaign in Albany, Georgia, that occupied much of his energy throughout 1962. King arrived in Rocky Mount after speaking recently in Sasser, Georgia, on Nov. 16, 1962 to commemorate the terrorizing burning of two black churches that had served as campaign headquarters for trying to secure long overdue voting rights for African Americans. Before his speech in Rocky Mount, Dr. King ate a meal prepared by Helen Gay at Pastor Dudley’s home.

While King had traveled to North Carolina before, he had not ever visited Rocky Mount. In between revising his sermons for the book Strength to Love, King soon returned again on a brief tour through the northeastern part of the state. On Dec. 20, 1962, he spoke before 500 people in the armory at Edenton, North Carolina.

November 27, 1962 places King’s use of “I have a dream” nine full months prior to its use at the Mall on Washington D.C. on Aug. 28, 1963. Having just completed the failed campaign in Albany — and right before the beginning of the successful project C (“C” standing for confrontation) still to come in the spring of 1963 in Eugene “Bull” Connor’s very own home of Birmingham, Alabama—King’s determined vision shows his resilience and optimism during one of the lowest points of his career.

Significance

While select scholars have long known that Dr. King used the refrain “I have a dream” at least two months before the March on Washington when he spoke in Detroit on June 23, 1963, this audio tape from Rocky Mount, North Carolina conclusively confirms that Dr. King had been using the refrain much earlier. The trajectory of this development reveals several things about what has come to stand as Dr. King’s most visible ideal.

First, Rocky Mount, North Carolina is now the site of a historical moment in our nation’s history. Rocky Mount, North Carolina, is the place where Martin Luther King’s first documented use of his iconic phrase “I have a dream” was delivered. This phrase serves as the basis of the century’s most recognizable speech. By 2008, over 97 percent of American teenagers recognized its words.

Second, we now have access to the complete audio recording, transcript, and annotated transcript of one of Martin Luther King’s most unique, lengthy, relevant, and inspiring speeches. Hearing a speech few have even read deepens the historical record of Dr. King’s dream and provides remarkable avenues of understanding for both scholars and the general public. The accuracy that is provided by the actual recording cannot be understated.

Third, while Dr. King’s incantatory delivery on the Mall of Washington made his dream seem spontaneous, it was actually invoked before August 28, 1963. In addition to these two iterations, we also know King ended a speech on June 23, 1963 with “I have a dream.” He refined and altered the refrain on each of these occasions before his most famous address. Understanding these alterations and their origins helps to amplify their history, effectiveness and purpose.

Fourth, Dr. King’s dream is held together by oral poetry. King not only illuminated the political ideals of the American dream and the prophetic nature of scripture when he spoke the words “I have a dream,” the repeated and well-measured uses of anaphora also reveal that his dream was literally poetic. In fact, Dr. King had been revising this same speech “Facing the Challenge of a New Age” since he first delivered it on Aug. 11, 1956 in Buffalo, N.Y. In that speech, long considered the thematic precursor to his “I Have a Dream” address in Washington, new research reveals that Dr. King ended his comments by rewriting (line by line) a famous poem by Langston Hughes entitled “I Dream a World.” This means that the poetry we recognize when we hear King repeat “I have a dream” is not merely the effect of a gifted speaker but rather the choice of man who knew and revered poetry so much that he memorized it. More than simple repetition, poetry is the thread that repeats in “I have a dream” and keeps the metaphor lingering in our minds. The themes of this speech, transformation and integration, are reinforced by King’s actual rhetoric as he simultaneously transforms and integrates ideas from scripture, the American Dream, and Hughes’s poetry. These are the three threads Dr. King stitched together to form his famous refrain.

While the first two of these threads has been well understood, the connection to Hughes is brand new. For the very first time, the trajectory of Dr. King’s revisions to his dream confirms Langston Hughes’ own personal beliefs that King’s famous “I have a dream” refrain was linked directly to his own poetry. This confirmation significantly deepens the historical record of these two American icons.

Langston Hughes

Born in 1902, Langston Hughes was one of the leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance movement of the 1920-30s that celebrated the culture and artistry of African Americans in and around Harlem, N.Y. During his career in the public eye from 1956-1968, Dr. King invoked no less than seven of Langston Hughes’ poems in his speeches and sermons (often reciting Hughes’s poems from memory). As contemporaries, the two men knew each other and exchanged letters. In fact, Hughes died in May of 1967, less than a year before King was assassinated. As he prepared for the surgery from which he would soon die, one of Hughes’ final handwritten letters was sent directly to Dr. King.

King always understood the power of current events. Playing off the final image of Hughes’s most famous poem ‘Dream Deferred,” Dr. King delivered one of his most powerful and personal sermons “Shattered Dreams” from his pulpit three weeks after another image from Hughes’ famous poem had become the source of inspiration for the immediate and long-staying Broadway hit “A Raisin in the Sun.”

Langston Hughes was the leading African American poet of Dr. King’s generation. Despite this reverence, Hughes was also overtly labeled a communist subversive. This made overtly invoking his ideas a challenge for Dr. King when he spoke in public.

Starting then in November of 1962, Dr. King began to stitch together his own dream by integrating numerous ideas across a wide range of sources. This act of integrating sources allowed his speeches to model the social integration he was calling for across the nation on all levels.

In addition to other sources, this speech in Rocky Mount confirms that the origins of Dr. King’s dream can also be traced back to the poetry of Langston Hughes. In 1956, when Dr. King was first attracted to Hughes’s poem “I Dream a World,” he focused on the poem’s image of a new world: when he revised this speech in 1962, he held fast to the idea of the dream by stitching together the political idea of the American dream and the prophetic stance of vision with the poetic ideals he’d first encountered in the poetry of Langston Hughes.

Why has the connection to Hughes been so hard to document?

Because of his controversial reputation, Dr. King never overtly referenced the name or ideas of Langston Hughes between 1960-65. These were the years in which the Communist label resulted in the most effective attacks against King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. However, Hughes’s ideas appear throughout the time that immediately precedes and follows this era in which King was most in the public eye. During this era, King simply personalized the ideas and avoided directly naming Hughes or his poems.

This speech confirms that Dr. King played a dangerous and high stakes game when he was dreaming. By rewriting rather than quoting Langston Hughes’ words, Dr. King simultaneously invoked his ideas by exalting the cultural roots of African Americans while at the same time outwitting those in power who would have attacked and discredited King for embracing an incendiary political stance ascribed to Hughes and his poetry. This combination of deep cultural pride and subversiveness has often been overlooked in Dr. King’s speeches.

This tension helps us better understand the political climate of the era.  Dr. King invoked the words of a black poet who stood simultaneously as the embodiment of the cultural values of African Americans even as he represented the nation’s greatest fears about Communist subversion.  From the lips of Dr. King, poetry, prophecy and politics worked together to move the nation.