From the WSJ Opinion Archives
HOUSES OF WORSHIP
The Power of Dreams
Why does Martin Luther King's speech resonate?
For most Americans, to watch Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech is to be introduced to something that is wonderfully familiar--we all recognize the words--but also somewhat alien. The dignity with which the men on the dais and the thousands in the audience carry themselves, wearing well-pressed slacks and dresses even in August, make the vintage footage look as old as a V-J Day parade, or even an early talkie. The cadences of the old Southern church tradition are heard less today than 45 years ago. And even many Christians have no firsthand experience with the revival shouts of "All right!" and "Yes, sir!," like those coming from the amen corner behind King.
The speech's foreignness tempts one to see it as the product of an otherworldly genius in King, or maybe something heritable, specific to "the black church" or "the oral tradition." If we're not careful, King can quickly become the homiletic equivalent of the stereotyped black athlete, admired for his "physicality" and "natural ability" but not for intelligence or industry. King almost inadvertently invites such diminution by visibly leaving his prepared text in the 11th minute of "I Have a Dream" and speaking brilliantly without notes for the remainder of the speech. It's like a streetball alley-oop, showing what he can do without even trying.
There is no gainsaying King's natural gifts. But King's speech didn't just bubble forth from some innate Negro musicality. Rather, it demonstrates a savvy understanding of how memorable oratory works, knowledge available even to stutterers and malapropists.
What lifts King's performance from merely brilliant to unforgettable is his use of what we might call resonance. The best speeches are almost never self-contained, wholly original works. They depend for their power on the ability to strike chords that already exist within us. Both Ronald Reagan's 1974 "City on a Hill" speech and Mario Cuomo's 1984 "A Tale of Two Cities" allude directly to John Winthrop's 1630 speech aboard the Arbella. At the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama quoted the Declaration of Independence, and he called people to "a belief in things not seen," which references Hebrews 11: "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." In John F. Kennedy's inaugural speech, he quoted Isaiah and alluded to the angel Gabriel. And so forth.
Indeed, oratory without allusion is usually little more than motivational speaking. And "I Have a Dream" is more densely packed with allusions and outright references than nearly any other speech in American history. King begins with Lincoln ("Five score years ago . . ."), moves quickly to the Declaration of Independence ("unalienable rights") and minutes later has invoked the prophet Amos ("justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream"). Before the speech is over, King has quoted "My Country 'Tis of Thee," with its American lyrics and its music lifted from the English "God Save the King," and the Negro spiritual "Free at Last." As Drew Hansen notes in his book about King's speech, "The Dream," just using the motif of the dream reminds biblically literate listeners of Joseph, Daniel and Joel. And King's hope that "the crooked places will be made straight" recalls Ecclesiastes, Isaiah and Luke.
"I Have a Dream" was the product not only of deep religious and secular learning, but also of practice. Although King won an Elks oratorical contest in high school, he got a C+ in public speaking at Crozer Seminary. Yet by the time King, at age 38, held forth in front of the Lincoln Memorial, he had used elements of the speech in hundreds of sermons over nearly 20 years. His masterpiece was thus the result of decades of hard work and drew on a lifetime of both religious and civic-republican education.
It so happens that two of our country's most skillful orators today, Sen. Obama and Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, are black. But their skin color, and the churches in which they may have been raised, have less to do with their prowess than we might guess. To the extent that they impress us, it's in part because they benefit from rigorous educations--Mr. Patrick went to Milton Academy, a prep school outside of Boston--and an easiness with the American and Judeo-Christian idioms. And their polished oratory would be impossible without habits of industry that, far from being unique to King, are the common property of all who dream.
Mr. Oppenheimer, the editor of In Character (www.incharacter.org), is writing a book about contemporary American oratory.
