Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I Have a Dream

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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I Have a Dream On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. stood behind a podium on the steps of the Lincoln monument preparing to deliver a speech to over 250,000 spectators. Spectators were divided by race, but joined by a single cause. This speech Dr. King was about to deliver would not just be any speech; this speech would go down in history as one of the most influential speeches of all time. Mark Twain was quoted as saying “It takes about three weeks to write a good speech.” However, Dr. King went against this statement, according to a member of his counsel who helped draft the “I Have a Dream” speech, Clarence B. Jones. In an article from the Washington Post titled “On Martin Luther King Day, remembering the first draft of ‘I Have a Dream’, Jones says …“When I arrived at Willard Hotel in Washington for a meeting on the evening of Tuesday, Aug. 27, Martin still didn’t know what he was going to say.” Merely 12 hours before the march was to begin, Dr. King sat down with Jones and Stanley Levison to create a draft for the coming day’s speech. Many ideals were thrown around that night, but yet the verdict was out on whether to reach out to the younger generation, to reach out to the government, or to preach a sermon. It wasn’t easy but Dr. King had to create a delivery method that would cover all the bases he wanted to include, such as his faith and civil rights reform, as well as find a way to relate to not only African Americans, but America as a whole. In the first two paragraphs of Dr. King’s speech, Dr. King wanted to reach out to members of congress, the only audience that could make the changes necessary for equal rights. He used the term “five score years ago” to give reference to Abraham Lincoln; the man whose monument steps Dr. King addressed his audience from. The use of the term five score, immediately drew listeners
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