How many days since
Martin Luther King I Have a Dream Speech?

The speech that wasn't planned

The "I Have a Dream" refrain that made the speech immortal was not in the prepared text. Martin Luther King had used the "I have a dream" phrase in speeches before — in Detroit just two months earlier — but it was not written into his Washington address. King was delivering his prepared speech when gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, standing nearby on the platform, called out "Tell them about the dream, Martin!" King set aside his notes and improvised the famous sequence. The decision to go off-script in front of 250,000 people and 3 million television viewers produced the most enduring piece of American oratory since Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

The March on Washington in context

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on 28 August 1963 was the largest political demonstration in American history to that point. Organised in part by Bayard Rustin — a gay civil rights activist whose sexuality was deliberately downplayed by march organisers to avoid controversy — the march drew an estimated 250,000 people, roughly a quarter of them white. President Kennedy, initially opposed to the march, watched the proceedings on television from the White House and met with civil rights leaders afterwards. The march is credited with providing the moral momentum for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed by President Johnson less than a year later. King was 34 years old when he delivered the speech.