A piece of oratory intended to support the Kennedy administration’s programme of civil rights reforms and their passage through congress, Dr. King delivered his speech, which contained allusions to Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation, Proclamation and Gettysburg address, in front of the Lincoln Memorial. The speech is a homage to the principles of America’s founding and a rearticulation of Lincoln’s sentiments on the abolition of slavery – “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” providing through this rearticulation of Lincoln’s quote the full acknowledgement that America had fallen short of its promise to provide “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” for all. Instead, it had delivered for many Americans the institutional racism that proceeded the post-civil war reconstruction. As a religious scholar and Baptist minister, King’s speech centres around his deep faith and in his belief in the ideals of equality and fraternity he found in the Bible.

These were the Christian ideals he saw as underpinning the United States of America. As Tocqueville in Democracy in America observed, ‘belief has to be the bedrock of the will to justice, else the rational parts of the body or the body-politic are thrown into paralysis.’ Martin Luther King sought to overcome this kind of apathy; “With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope […] will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day”. King’s speech also brims with romantic references to the natural beauty of the United States, emphasising the natural state of freedom for all men that he asserts is their right. King’s use of the natural world is deliberate and echoes Rousseau’s understanding that the progress of civilisation has brought us away from our compassionate moral selves, and to reconnect to one is to reconnect to the other. “Let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire […] mighty mountains of New York […] heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania […] snow-capped Rockies of Colorado […] curvaceous slopes of California […] Stone Mountain of Georgia […] Lookout Mountain of Tennessee […] every hill and molehill of Mississippi.” Justice is transcendent.

Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream…’ speech and its non-inflammatory rhetoric acted as a mobiliser to the lasting racial equality legislation that arose through the civil rights movement in the United States, in it King delivered a restatement of the promise of egalitarian democracy. “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will be judged not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.” It is fitting then that at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Dedication in 2011 America’s first black president Barack Obama, said of King’s speech ‘without that shining moment, without Dr. King’s glorious words, we might not have had the courage to come as far as we have. Because of that hopeful vision, because of Dr. King’s moral imagination, barricades began to fall and bigotry began to fade. New doors of opportunity swung open for an entire generation. Yes, laws changed, but hearts and minds changed, as well.’