"I Have a Dream" is a public speech that was delivered by American civil rights activist and Baptist minister Martin Luther King Jr. during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963.

[7] Jon Meacham writes that, "With a single phrase, King joined Jefferson and Lincoln in the ranks of men who've shaped modern America".

[10] The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was partly intended to demonstrate mass support for the civil rights legislation proposed by President John F. Kennedy in June.

King originally designed his speech as a homage to Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, timed to correspond with the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation.

[15][16] After being rediscovered in 2015,[17] the restored and digitized recording of the 1962 speech was presented to the public by the English department of North Carolina State University.

I have a dream ... District of Columbia Widely hailed as a masterpiece of rhetoric, King's speech invokes pivotal documents in American history, including the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the United States Constitution.

The most widely cited example of anaphora is found in the often quoted phrase "I have a dream", which is repeated eight times as King paints a picture of an integrated and unified America for his audience.

[30] Among the most quoted lines of the speech are "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

"[31] According to US representative John Lewis, who also spoke that day as the president of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, "Dr. King had the power, the ability, and the capacity to transform those steps on the Lincoln Memorial into a monumental area that will forever be recognized.

For years, he had spoken about dreams, quoted from Samuel Francis Smith's popular patriotic hymn "America (My Country, 'Tis of Thee)", and referred extensively to the Bible.

[12][35] King is said to have used portions of SNCC activist Prathia Hall's speech at the site of Mount Olive Baptist, a burned-down African-American church in Terrell County, Georgia, in September 1962, in which she used the repeated phrase "I have a dream".

[37] The speech in the cadences of a sermon is infused with allusions to biblical verses, including Isaiah 40:4–5 ("I have a dream that every valley shall be exalted ..."[38]) and Amos 5:24 ("But let justice roll down like water ..."[39]).

A dynamic spectacle has origins from the Aristotelian definition as "a weak hybrid form of drama, a theatrical concoction that relied upon external factors (shock, sensation, and passionate release) such as televised rituals of conflict and social control.

King's speech can be classified as a dynamic spectacle, given "the context of drama and tension in which it was situated" (during the Civil Rights Movement and the March on Washington).

"[46] You could feel "the passion of the people flowing up to him," James Baldwin, a skeptic of that day’s March on Washington, later wrote, and in that moment, "it almost seemed that we stood on a height, and could see our inheritance; perhaps we could make the kingdom real."

"[48] An article in The Boston Globe by Mary McGrory reported that King's speech "caught the mood" and "moved the crowd" of the day "as no other" speaker in the event.

[50] An article in the Los Angeles Times commented that the "matchless eloquence" displayed by King—"a supreme orator" of "a type so rare as almost to be forgotten in our age"—put to shame the advocates of segregation by inspiring the "conscience of America" with the justice of the civil-rights cause.

This provoked the organization to expand their COINTELPRO operation against the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and to target King specifically as a major enemy of the United States.

Malcolm X later wrote in his autobiography: "Who ever heard of angry revolutionaries swinging their bare feet together with their oppressor in lily pad pools, with gospels and guitars and 'I have a dream' speeches?

[55] The diaries of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., published posthumously in 2007, suggest that President Kennedy was concerned that if the march failed to attract large numbers of demonstrators, it might undermine his civil rights efforts.

[citation needed] In 1992, the band Moodswings, incorporated excerpts from Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech in their song "Spiritual High, Part III" on the album Moodfood.

[57][58] Also in 1992, rock band Extreme incorporated parts of the Detroit speech into their song "Peacemaker Die" on the album III Sides to Every Story.

[60] In 2003, the National Park Service dedicated an inscribed marble pedestal to commemorate the location of King's speech at the Lincoln Memorial.

"[62] A 30-foot (9.1 m)-high relief sculpture of King named the Stone of Hope stands past two other large pieces of granite that symbolize the "mountain of despair" split in half.

[62] On August 26, 2013, UK's BBC Radio 4 broadcast "God's Trombone", in which Gary Younge looked behind the scenes of the speech and explored "what made it both timely and timeless".

[citation needed] On April 20, 2016, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew announced that the US $5 bill, which has featured the Lincoln Memorial on its back, would undergo a redesign prior to 2020.

Lew said that a portrait of Lincoln would remain on the front of the bill, but the back would be redesigned to depict various historical events that have occurred at the memorial, including an image from King's speech.

"[79] In the wake of King's death, the speech was issued as a single under Gordy Records and managed to crack onto the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at number 88.