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UCLA professor explains why Dr. King's I Have a Dream speech is so enduring. (2:37)
 

Full interview. (11:19)
 

Tavis: Eric Sundquist is a professor of literature at UCLA and the author of a unique look at the speech Dr. King gave now 46 years ago at the March on Washington. The book is called "King's Dream: The Legacy of Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' Speech." Professor Sundquist, nice to have you on the program.

Eric Sundquist: Thanks so much.

Tavis: I want to start with a quote from the book. I wrote this down so I can get it right, and I'm sure they'll put it up on the screen. This really got my attention when I was going through the text. You write in this book, "In purely rhetorical terms, the 'Dream' speech may not have been King's best. His speech at the conclusion of the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 was arguably his most commanding."

Raises a couple of questions for me. Number one, tell me why you think the Selma to Montgomery speech in '65 was the most commanding. Then I'll circle back to the "Dream" speech.

Sundquist: Well, in part because it capped two weeks of violence that resulted in the injury of many civil rights protestors and brought the marchers to the doorstep of the Montgomery state house, where George Wallace was looking out through the closed blinds at the marchers.

So I think it represented a high point in King's command of the civil rights movement that perhaps he had not yet reached in 1963 - the great call and response that he engaged in, how long, how long, with the crowd responding to him, and his use of the phrase "arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward world justice."

Tavis: "Bends toward justice," yeah.

Sundquist: I think there were a variety of things in that speech that because it was partly improvised, because it was much more responsive, I think, to the crowd than his speech in Washington, might have been rhetorically the most interesting.

Tavis: Another speech post-'63 - so you got the "I Have a Dream" speech in '63, but you have, as you mentioned, the Selma to Montgomery speech in '65, you got the Vietnam speech. Assess for me the Vietnam speech.

Sundquist: Well, the Vietnam speech was important less, I think, rhetorically than for the fact that King stood out from his base of support in a way that put him somewhat at risk. He did not have the significant support of those who had joined him all the way along in the march of the civil rights movement when he broke with many of them who, conservative Blacks and others, liberals of all stripes, who were supportive of the war or at least wouldn't have questioned it in quite the same terms that he did.

His critics said that he, in effect, "spoke for the enemy" rather than for the United States and it allowed them to circle back to some of the criticism that they had of him early on in his career, when he was branded a communist, a radical, someone who was dangerous to the country rather than representing its best interests.

So I would say it's not the language of the speech so much as its political effect, and at significant cost to King at a critical moment in his own career.

Tavis: Indeed. I wanted to start with those two other speeches to ask this question - why, then, the "I Have a Dream" speech endures as one that Eric Sundquist would want to spend this kind of time invested in to dissect?

Sundquist: I think there are two reasons. One of them is rhetorical and I'll come back to that; the second is, and perhaps more important in some respects, is situational.

The summer of 1963 I think was a critical moment in the history of the civil rights movement. It wasn't the culmination that perhaps came somewhat later, but it was a critical moment in the sense that King was coming off a great victory, although a difficult, contentious victory, in Birmingham. The movement demonstrations were spreading across the South. As many as a thousand different demonstrations were noted by the FBI in the months following Birmingham.

It was the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, a point that King harped on throughout 1963. And it created, I think, the opportunity for King to galvanize the movement, to build on the victory in Birmingham, and to suggest that it wasn't a local matter specific to the South, it was a national matter that concerned the rights not just of all African Americans, but it concerned the rights of all Americans.

So the moment was significant. Rhetorically the answer is that absent the last 11 minutes of the speech, which were improvised, in which King departed from his prepared text, we would remember the speech as a significant speech in part because of the success of the march itself and because of the enormous audience that King was able to speak to on television and elsewhere.

But we perhaps would not - we wouldn't remember it as the "Dream" speech because the cadences from which that tag derives, King decided extemporaneously to deliver. We wouldn't remember it for its commanding portrait of the United States as a series of mountain ranges from which freedom should ring, from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania to even Stone Mountain in Georgia.

We wouldn't have found King calling upon this deep reservoir of materials that he had been cultivating since his student days, and certainly as a minister over the course of his career to spontaneously reach the crowd in a way that I think he felt he had not quite reached them before.

Tavis: I agree with you that the speech has a couple of movements in it, and you're right about the fact that he goes off-script and starts to freestyle, as it were, on the "I Have a Dream" part.

That speech to me, though, and I want to get your take on this, has really three kind of movements in it. He starts out with this beautiful construct where he's using the Constitution to make the argument for why Negroes need to be free, for why they deserve equality and justice. He starts out with a beautiful construct, which I want to ask you about in just a second.

Then at a certain point there is a bit of a lull in the speech. He starts out on a high. The speech has this lull in it for a few minutes, and to your point, if you listen to the tape, as you have many times, you can hear the only woman who got on the podium that day, Mahalia Jackson, to sing, the great gospel singer, you can hear Mahalia Jackson in the background, as you've heard her say many times, "Tell them about the dream, Martin. Tell them about the dream."

Mahalia had heard Dr. King use this refrain before. He goes off-script after being encouraged by his friend Haley to tell them about the dream, starts riffing, as you said, and the speech takes off, it blows up.

And that's the part, you're right, that we remember. But when I studied the speech, and you've written the book on it, it is that construct in the beginning that really makes the speech. It's that platform he built that makes all that dream stuff possible at the end. Talk to me about the first half of how he constructed the speech.

Sundquist: Well, I think one of the things to point out is that the beginning prepares for the end in the very simple sense that King starts, after his brief welcome, by invoking Abraham Lincoln without naming him - "Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation."

So he sets the stage there for his metaphor of the promissory note, which he develops at great length in the early paragraphs of the speech, a promissory note that I think he traces back not simply to the Declaration of Independence and his belief in maybe the pure ideal articulated by Thomas Jefferson, but to the Constitution itself, about which there had been great argument as to whether it was an anti-slavery or pro-slavery document or whether it was neutral on the matter.

So I think he sets the stage by asking us to understand the vision of the Founding Fathers as they were purified in the vision of Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation. He then rehearses in a variety of ways the degree to which the Civil War Amendments, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendment, although he doesn't speak of them in those terms, had deteriorated over the course of the subsequent 100 years so that the promissory note had to be redeemed and set on a new course towards fulfillment in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

And yet still almost a decade later after Brown, the South was engaged in massive resistance, the country itself is ambivalent about whether Brown ought to be fulfilled or at what speed it ought to be fulfilled.

What King in effect did at the March on Washington was trace that note through that 150-year history and say now is the time to make it real.

Tavis: So finally, then, even though the speech delivered, and not just on that day but of course we get the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of '64 and '65, so it delivers beyond '63 to get the kind of legislation we want. And yet even then, and especially today, when we think about the "I Have a Dream" speech 46 years later, it is the dream that we want to focus on and not the real challenge that King laid out in the first part of that speech. Why do you think that is?

Sundquist: Well, the dream is a malleable metaphor - it suits all kinds of purposes, for commercial use, marketable use, every kind of cause under the sun has been attached to the dream.

I think King's best friend and closest aide, Ralph Abernathy, got it right, perhaps, when he himself thought probably King's last speech, the speech delivered on the eve of his assassination in Memphis, was his greatest speech, but Abernathy concluded that no, actually, the "Dream" speech is the most important because it offered what he called "a prophecy of pure hope."

And I think that utopian dimension of the speech, its downside is it can be adapted to all kinds of different purposes; it can be used by conservative Republicans to argue against affirmative action, it can be used by every conceivable cause under the sun.

But nonetheless, there's something deeply attractive about it that I think derives from King's own assessment that it's a dream deeply rooted in the American dream, not just the dream of material prosperity but the dream that he said "animates the American enterprise" and has animated it from the beginning.

Tavis: There are many now, and I suspect well into the future, who will believe that this is perhaps the greatest speech ever given. It will be debated and dissected for again many, many years to come. And Eric J. Sundquist, professor at UCLA, has done a good job of dissecting the speech given 46 years ago - "I Have a Dream," at the March on Washington. The book is called "King's Dream." Professor Sundquist, nice to have you on the program.

Sundquist: It's been my pleasure.

Tavis: My pleasure to have you.