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On MLK Day, Essays Revisit ‘I Have a Dream’ and Urge Service Through Nonviolence

Commentators highlight King’s appeal to the nation’s founding promises, urging people to live his principles today.

The top of the Washington Monument and part of a US flag are reflected in the sunglasses of Austin Clinton Brown, 9, of Gainesville, Georgia, as he joins others in the March on Washington in August 1963.
By the 1950s the "American dream" had come to symbolize a steady job and a tidy house in the suburbs. Here moving vans unload families' possessions in December 1952 in this new housing development in Lakewood, California.
Peaceful demonstrators walk along the National Mall during the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. The gathering was a high-water mark for the civil rights movement.
A year before the stock market crash of 1929 plunged the country into the Great Depression, men line up for bread at the Bowery Mission in New York City on March 31, 1928.

Overview

  • Writers recall King’s 1963 address at the Lincoln Memorial to roughly 250,000 people, framing civil rights as a promissory note embedded in the Declaration and Constitution.
  • The speech explicitly called for disciplined, nonviolent action in the face of segregation and police brutality, rejecting bitterness and hatred.
  • Editors note the famous refrain was absent from prepared drafts for Washington, with Mahalia Jackson reportedly prompting King to add it during delivery after he had used it in Detroit.
  • Current reflections emphasize service beyond self and nonviolent pursuit of justice, echoing King’s “Drum Major Instinct” sermon and Bernice King’s call to “Be a King.”
  • Commentary acknowledges King’s critics, including clergy cited in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” while arguing that progress has advanced through the nation’s existing institutions and ideals.