I have a dream

Paul Ford commenting on MLK's I Have a Dream speech, which is 40 years old today.

Thursday, August 28, 2003. In the intervening years, this speech has been reinterpreted and co-opted by: those who would make King into a good negro, forgetting his uncomfortable radicalism; those who would make King into an Uncle Tom, claiming that he didn't go far enough, that his non-violence can be equated with weakness; those who would use his philandering as a convenient reason to dismiss his labors, his jail time, his endless work (let he who is without sin....); and those who take pleasure in the rhetorical grace of the speech, but ignore or cannot fathom its native substance, and sample the speech for pop songs, layer it into montages, or use it in television commercials. None of this co-opting changes the fact that the speech is one of the single excellent pieces of exhortatory, visionary rhetoric ever written, and certainly the last great city-on-the-hill vision of America that we've received—written by a man who lived under segregation in the old, bad south. 40 years to the day later, the vision is completely unrealized. But at least it's a lighthouse towards which to steer. Originally from Wednesday, August 28, 1963. By Martin Luther King, Jr..