I Have A Dream

"I Have a Dream" is a 17-minute public speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered on August 28, 1963, in which he called for an end to racism in the United States. The speech, delivered to over 200,000 civil rights supporters from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, was a defining moment of the American Civil Rights Movement.

King begins by invoking the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed millions of slaves in 1863, but says that "one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free." At the end of the speech, King departed from his prepared text for a partly improvised peroration on the theme of "I have a dream", possibly prompted by Mahalia Jackson's cry, "Tell them about the dream, Martin!" In this part of the speech, which most excited the crowd and has now become the most famous, King described dreams of freedom and equality arising from a land of slavery and hatred.

"I have a dream" was ranked the top American speech of the 20th century by a 1999 poll of scholars of public address.