I Have a Dream

Most people know the last few minutes. The full speech, given at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, opens with a pointed argument that America had given its Black citizens "a bad check" that came back marked "insufficient funds," and it presses "the fierce urgency of now" well before any dream appears. Martin Luther King Jr. began from his prepared text and then, by his own account, turned aside from the manuscript and never came back to it. Hearing the whole thing shows how the famous ending grows out of that hard opening rather than replacing it.