Miller’s Origin of a Dream Documentary To Be Screened Thursday

None of this was Jason Miller’s dream.

All the Omaha, Nebraska, native and former small-college basketball player wanted to do was study and teach the poetry and social activism of Langston Hughes at a small liberal arts college without the expectation of deep academic research.

As a distinguished professor of English at NC State, however, he began diving into the relationship between Hughes and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and that’s when a whole new world of scholarship opened its doors, thanks to a hidden audio tape in the back of a Rocky Mount library’s bookstack.

“It’s really startling because none of the things are what I envisioned,” Miller says. “I never had any interest in doing research and never dreamed of being a professor until I was 29.”

Dreams, however, can become exponentially bigger by the day.

Miller never lost his focus on Hughes, and the poet’s relationship with King, but he became fascinated with King’s history in North Carolina, from the minister pitching his first book at Broughton High School in 1957 to his appearance on NC State’s campus at Reynolds Coliseum on July 31, 1966, to the ill-fated telegram that halted his trip back to the Old North State in April 1968, keeping him in Memphis to participate in the city’s sanitation workers’ strike.

The most visible leader of America’s nonviolent civil rights movement was assassinated there on April 4, sparking nationwide protests, riots and a collective national mourning.

Because of Miller’s work studying the influences of Hughes’ writing on King’s speeches, he has become a well-known figure among King scholars as an expert in the roots of King’s most famous phrase—and the foundation of one of the most important speeches in national and world history.

It all began in the town of Rocky Mount, about an hour east of NC State’s campus, when King first publicly uttered the phrase “I have a dream.”

Miller found several of the surviving 1,800 town leaders and citizens who attended the speech and were willing to share memories of the transformative event.

“Over and over again, they started saying how that one moment changed their lives,” Miller says. “That seemed a little dramatic, but then when they gave the testimony of their lives, it really did.

“One guy [Rev. Tolokun Omokunde] became a pastor after meeting Dr. King that day. Another person devoted their life to community service. Another person [Brenda Armstrong] became the first African American doctor at Duke Healthcare. These people’s lives that emerged from this encounter were really remarkable.”

For the last 12 years Miller has worked with international civil rights researchers and King scholars to delve even deeper into the leader’s past. That’s how he was tipped off to the existence of a transcript of King’s Rocky Mount speech in the gymnasium of Booker T. Washington High School on Nov. 27, 1962, some nine months before the famous version King gave at the March on Washington the next spring.

The transcript was from an audiotape that had been circulating around Rocky Mount for more than half a century, including a 38-year stint in a dusty attic of someone’s home.

Working with Emmy award-winning filmmaker Neal Hutcheson and filmmaker Rebecca Cerese, Miller has now produced an hour-long documentary film, Origin of a Dream, about that version of the speech, featuring some of the forceful voices of close King allies, such as Ambassador Andrew Young, former Georgia representative Julian Bond and actor Danny Glover.

Watch the Trailer

The documentary film will be screened in Rocky Mount on Saturday and at the Hunt Library Auditorium on Centennial Campus next Thursday, Jan. 22, from 6:30 to 8 p.m. Tickets to the Raleigh showing are free, but reservations are required.

The film will be followed by a panel discussion featuring Miller, co-producer Cash Michaels and Everett Ward, an NC State alumnus who was the 11th president of St. Augustine’s University, a historically Black university in Raleigh.