The Content of the Speech "I Have a Dream"

Introduction

This speech “I have a dream” , which bears no introduction, was one of the many delivered gracefully by the renouned Civil Rights leader Dr. Martin L. King. It would go down in history as one of the greatest moments in the struggle for equality and   freedom of the black nation. The contents of the speech which I will later discuss set the scene and give us an insight to the true struggles and dedication made by the Civil Rights march to get to this point.

Body

For centuries the principles in which America was founded fell short   for those of a skin colour other than white. After the Civil War black Americans where granted free from slavery, something that had been bestowed upon them for the past “300 years”. This was freedom was made possible by Washington with the 13th   Amendment to the Constituion. However as King states clearly in his speech this unfortuanetly would only serve as a “Day break of captivity” , for what was to come. With this, like all policies come resistance. Local laws and organisations like the Ku Klux Khlan where set up to see that the “unalienable Rights” of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” would not be granted for those of the negro nation.

The reconstruction of a country now full of unemployed and uneducated black folk posed an immediate threat for most states if not all. When the federal troops pulled out of the south, “Jim Crow” laws came into place segragating public facilities , voting, work and other areas of society. With such injustices some blacks felt the only solution was to seperate themselves from white society and become “exiles”. They began to set up their own organisations, buisnesses and services.

On December 5, 1955 when Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus, the well educated spokesman Martin Luther King emerged and was electd as president of the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association. King, today known as one of the “worlds advocates” of...