Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech

MLK Jr.'s "I had a dream" speech

Martin Luther King was a famous leader of the American civil rights movements, a political activist, a baptist minister and he was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize, at the age of thirty-five, for his work as a promoter of equal treatment for different races. His "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered on the steps of Lincoln Memorial in 1963, during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, became one of the most important and enthusiastic of his speeches, having a great influence in the American history.

One of the remarkable lines of his speech underlines that: "And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

His word sustain the goals of the March on Washington, because the purpose of this event was to reveal the condition of blacks in the south ant to put pressure on those who had the power to change things, and to improve the situation of black people in America.

The march made some important demands: an end to racial segregation in public school; meaningful civil rights legislation, including a law prohibiting racial discrimination in employment; protection of civil rights workers from police brutality. These are demands that Martin Luther King has also stated in his "I Have a Dream" speech, showing that America is an amazing nation, a country where children "will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.." Martin Luther King's hope was that all American citizens will make an important and valuable contribution to the creation of an American dream: a dream of equality between all people and all races; he believed that "if America is to be a great nation, this must become true." And that "it would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment."

The march on Washington and his well-known speech, delivered on the steps of Lincoln Memorial, was a way of keeping up pressure for federal civil rights legislation. This famous speech affected the crowd of approximately 250,000 civil rights supporters who attended the March on Washington, but it has also affected millions of lives, because it was an important contributory factor in changing the image of civil rights and, in the same time, in changing the whole American system.