Dr. Martin Luther King's I Have A Dream

In this essay, I am going to be discussing the features of Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous speech, I Have a Dream. Since you likely are familiar with this speech, I am going to skip the semantics of summarizing it. In general, when I first listened to it, I wasn’t sure how to approach with my analysis because I couldn’t identify many of the traditional markers of the African American oral tradition. Upon further examination though I discovered that this speech is far more colorful and in depth than I initially thought. The main feature I noticed was a heavy use of sermon discourse. In addition, there is a significant amount of signifying, and towards the end of the speech, a feature called ‘talk-singing’, where the speaker mixes speech and

Probably the single most obvious trait of this famous speech is Martin Luther King’s heavy use of repetition. It is this use of repetition which drives home the name-sake of what is probably one of the most famous speeches of the 20th century, if not all time. He repeats the clause “I have a dream” no less than nine times in the span of around 2 minutes. In addition to the repetition with “I have a dream”, towards the end of the speech, there appears a theme of freedom that’s referenced repeatedly numerous times, accompanying the clause “let freedom ring”. Regarding this repetition, as quoted from a sermon of Martin Luther King in Spoken Soul, “Sir, we would see Jesus, the light of the world. We know about Plato, but we want to see Jesus. We know about Aristotle, but we want to see Jesus. We know about Homer, but we want to see Jesus” (Rickford). Repetition is a common feature of sermon discourse (Rickford), which I will expand on

For example, the sentence before the first “I have a dream” reference, King says “Let us not wallow in the valley of despair” (King). This at first jumped out to me as a reference to the valley of death in the Bible which I mentioned above (Psalms). Aside from the religious connotations, there is a second, more hidden implication – the valley of despair (or the valley of death in biblical context) can be considered to be racial inequality in America. A few paragraphs later Dr. King continues this thread in a different context, saying that “I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low”. This solidifies this interpretation – where the valley is the despair and bitterness of racial inequality, and the hill and mountain are the direct opposite, the false superiority of white people. The leveling of the valleys would thus then be the equaling of the gap – resulting in a level playing field for everyone, regardless of race or ethnicity. This isn’t something one picks up on immediately, but upon re-reading it through this stuck out to me as suggesting a rectifying of the extreme racial inequality at the