Martin Luther King. Image: top-10-list.org

Here are 10 facts you might not know about Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963.

1) The speech is known as “I Have a Dream” but those words were never in the original draft, they were ad libbed on the day.

2) It lasts 17 minutes and is widely considered to have been drafted in New York and then in Washington in the hours before the rally.

3) As a result of the speech, Dr King was named Man of the Year by Time Magazine in 1963, and won the Nobel Peace Prize the following year.

4) Dr King drew his references from a wide variety of sources, including the Bible, the US Declaration of Independence and Shakespeare.

5) The speech was watched by more than 200,000 people assembled for the March on Washington, the largest march of the civil rights movement, as well as millions on television.

6) According to his co-authors, Dr King was so busy with the march that, 12 hours before the speech, he still did not have a firm idea about what he was going to say.

7) It was ranked the top speech of the 20th Century by a poll of academics.

8) It is said to have had several names and drafts, including “The normalcy speech” and “A Cancelled check”.

9) Dr King was the subject of one of the Irish band U2’s most famous songs, Pride (In the Name of Love).

10) Describing watching the oration, his co-author Clarence B Jones said the speech “went on to depart drastically from the draft I’d delivered”, adding: “In front of all those people, cameras, and microphones, Martin winged it.”

Author: Nick Britten
Telegraph.co.uk