Martin Luther King Jr Essay Example for Free

Martin Luther pouf Jr EssayIn 1998, an Atlanta Federal District Court judge ruled that Martin Luther powers I kick in a Dream bringing was part of bailiwick history and that CBS did non contend to seek permission to air it in an diachronic documentary that include a segment on the well-mannered rights relocation. The documentary, convey in 1994, incorporated a nine-minute excerpt of tabbys historic computer address. The office Corporation lawyers in the case argued that CBS had unlawfully used great powers eloquent, creative, literary expressions.Arguing the conclusiveness before the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, the powerfulness family succeeded in having it overturned two years after. Although the stopping point was the first to legally cement the mogul familys rights, this was not the first era the copyright had convey an issue, nor would it be the last. Presciently, powerfulness had copyrighted the bringing a month after it was de come throughred and h is heirs clung tenaciously to the persuasion that it was a bequest to them (Stout 16). Cl atomic number 18nce Jones, faggots lawyer and confidant, filed suit against Twentieth Century Fox Records and Mr.Maestro Records for event bootleg copies of the lecturing (Branch 886).However, world-beater granted Motown Records permission to release two recordings of his dialectes (Great March to license and Great March to Washington), provided told Motown founder Berry Gordy that he wanted the entire proceeds to be donated to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). When Gordy urged King to keep half of the royalties for himself and his family, King insisted it go to the SCLC so as not to give the impression that he was benefitting from the cause of civic rights (Posner 17576).Kings family, like Gordy, has seen the speech as an important source of revenue, some of which undoubtedly has been used to advance Kings legacy. Since winning their appeal against CBS, the King fa mily has continued to exploit the copyright of the speech, agreeing to sell the cut telephone company Alcatel the right to use a digitally altered version of the event for a 2001 television set commercial. The commercial 184 Martin Luther King Jr. s I Have a Dream manner of speaking 185 shows King speaking jarringly absent the 250,000 hatful who had on that day lined the reflecting pool on the national mall.The commercial asks what would have happened if Kings terminology had not been able to connect with his listening (Szegedy-Maszak 20). Selling a permission to use the speech for a television commercial and engaging in legal wrangling nearly the news medias right to rebroadcast the speech are not developments that could be predicted from the iconic status the speech has achieved in national history. Although the legal dimensions of the speechs scattering are of interest, we are primarily interested in how Kings speech has fuck off a permanent fixture in the collective dep ot of Ameri do-nothing citizens despite the copyright controversy.In a recent book on the speech, Drew Hansen suggests that it is the oratorical equivalent of the Declaration of Independence (The Dream 214). What Edwin unforgiving said of the Gettysburg Address is equally true of I Have a Dream The speech is icy now in the history of a people (Black 21). Far more than an ordinary written or performed text, Kings speech is now viewed as a text be longsighteding to the nation, despite its accredited legal status. Coretta Scott King suggested that when King delivered the speech he was connected to a loftyer power (King).Whether or not divinely inspired, the speech has come to symbolismize the civil rights movement and anchors collective in the public eye(predicate) memory of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Equality and of King himself. Although Kings I Have a Dream speech is now accepted as one of the most important speeches of the twentieth century, this has not alway s been the case. Reactions to the speech immediately quest its delivery were mixed. Some praised the speech, while inexplicably others completely ignored it.How did Kings speech achieve its iconic status given the mixed reaction immediately following its presentation? Thinking of the speech as generative of its own fame supports the legendary aura that now surrounds it, however its elevated stature resulted from a gradual process of media dissemination and cultural amplification. The touchstones in this process included eventual comparisons of Kings grandiloquence to Lincolns, media portrayals of Kings role in the civil rights movement following his assassination, and the appropriation of the speech as a synecdoche for that movement.The memory of Lincolns speech was fixed by print, while Kings speech was fixed by the electronic media. In 1863, no one realized that Abraham Lincolns humble Remarks by the President at the Gettysburg sacrament would have become part of national icon ography. Years later, Carl Sandburg referred to it reverentially as the immense American poem, but part of the apocryphal lore of the speech is that Lincoln truly believed the world would not note nor long remember what he and others said at Gettysburg.Senator Edward Everett, one 186 ANQ A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews of the great ceremonial orators of his day, had satisfied every expectation of his interview with an address that took him two hours to deliver. It had taken Lincoln precisely three minutes to utter his 272 words (Wills 68). Lincolns speech gradually reached a substitute(prenominal) audience through the accounts of newspapers Kings speech was instantaneously comprehend and seen by radio listeners and television viewers numbering in the millions.For all its compelling metaphor and soaring imagery, I Have a Dream is more drama than poetry as drama, it must be heard and seen. Kings rhetorical genius was oral, Lincolns written. Lincoln r tra nscendentally, while King spoke in the arcsecond. Journalist Richard Carter, an eyewitness of the speech, reminds us that never before had a civil rights demonstration been aired live on national television (38). It was also the last such mass meeting to be broadcast (Branch 876).Of the ten civil rights leaders who spoke at the rally, King did most to ignite the assembly, but the conflict on television audiences derived from the interplay of King, his speech, the response of the crowd, and even the frequent cutaways to Lincolns statue. Carter finds it inexplicable that television dilettante Kay Gardella of the New York Daily News, who acknowledged that the speech was the most moving of the rally, subordinated the impress of Kings words to the visual images that the television camera associated with them Most effective and meaningful, she aid, were the cutaways to Lincolns statue (38).To those in the television spiritualist who recorded the speech, and probably to those who watch ed it, the stone statue of the Great Emancipator amplified the combined effect of Kings lyrical words, mellifluous voice, and determined countenance. The symbolic interplay between King and Lincoln was also not lost on E. W. Kenworthy, who filed the front page story for the clock times It was Dr. Kingwho had suffered perhaps most of allwho ignited the crowd with words that might have been written by the sad brooding man enshrined within (1). crowd Reston, on the same New York Times front page, declared that King touched the vast audience. Until whence the pilgrimage was merely a great spectacle (1). The Time Magazine article about the rally all the way understood the importance of Kings speech Kings particular magic had enslaved his audience, Time said of the prepared portion of Kings text, while particularly praising the extemporized section with which the speech ended as catching, dramatic, inspirational (Beginning). Not every major news outlet recognized the importance of Kin gs speech.The Washington Post, for example, focused on the speech delivered by A. Philip Randolph, without even discovering Kings (Branch 886). The historic and literary brilliance of Lincolns address at Gettysburg had also not been universally recognized by journalists. The fact that Lincolns speech became so famous is twice remarkable when one considers how few people actually heard it or saw so oft as a break big money of Lincoln delivering it. Illustrators would fill in the visual gaps that photographers likeMatthew Brady had left out.There is Martin Luther King Jr. s I Have a Dream Speech 187 only one photograph of Lincoln on the speakers platform and it was taken from some distance away (Kunhardt, Kunhardt, and Kunhardt 315). Kings speech, by contrast, was forever wedded to a set of visual imagesof Lincolns statue, of the antiphonal throng, and of King himself, visibly moved by his own words. It is difficult to explain precisely how Kings speech went from privately copyr ighted words to cherished public property, but surely the number of people who saw and heard and felt his speech live was an important ingredient.In the case of Lincolns speech, it helped that it was apparently spare and simple, something school children could easily read, memorize, and declaim. At eighteen minutes, Kings speech is nearly six times as long as Lincolns, but the dramatic climax of the speech is short enough to replay in honoring King or in the retelling of civil rights movement history, and the imagery of the speech is often striking. Both Kings and Lincolns speeches were tied to a momentous event, and the messages of both can be appreciated, if not fully understood, by successive generations without providing detailed historical context.The same cannot be said of Lincolns lawyerly and highly nuanced First Inaugural Address, or for that head Kings Vietnam era antiwar speech, A Time to Break Silence. The addresses at Gettysburg and the Lincoln Memorial sheer tumult uous chapters in American history. Martyrdom, Memorialization, and Mass Circulation The martyrdom of Lincoln and King did much to propel rehearsals of their plant and words. Pulitzer Prize winning historian David Garrow agrees with King biographer Drew Hansen that the speech received little further mention until after King was assassinated.Although King was honored by Time as its Man of the Year in 1964, the same year he won the Nobel Peace Prize, prior to Kings assassination in that respect was not a reason for the press to commemorate Kings biography or come forth in history. The identification between King and his enunciated dream heard by millions was unavoidable and seemingly inevitable. presently after his death, Motown Records reissued a single recording of the Dream speech (Waller 48). Eulogizing King in 1968, Time spoke of the dream peroration of his speech as the peak of his oratorical career (Transcendent).While Corretta King asked supporters to tie in us in fulfilli ng his dream (Rugaber 1), the New York Times structured its eulogy of the fallen martyr by discussing aspects of his dream (He had a dream E12), and in another article judged that his speech at the LincolnMemorial was the high point of Dr. Kings war for civil rights (Mitgang E1). King himself perpetuated his identification with the dream by introducing it into his later speeches. 188 ANQ A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews Immediately after the assassination, Democratic Congressmen proposed the establishment of a Martin Luther King Jr. oliday, but it did not come to fruition until 1983 (Hansen, The Dream 216).The holiday itself has given impetus for yearbook narrativeizing of King and synoptic renderings of his flavour. Thus, the speech, particularly the prophetic dream section and dramatic conclusion, continued to be heard by virtually every generation of Americans. The speech was widely anthologized and was so widely taught in college public speaking class es that in 1982 Haig Bosmajian published an article in Communication Education to correct inaccurate versions of the speech.In 1998, Time listed it as one of only four of the centurys greatest speeches, putting the speech in a firmament with speeches by Churchill, Roosevelt, and Kennedy and offering an abbreviated quotation of the dream section and peroration ( four-spot). Within recent years, two books have been written about the speech, as books were also written about the Gettysburg address (Sunnemark Hansen, The Dream). There are few American speeches so important as to inspire book-length treatments. The take of the speech by the media has been a mixed blessing.Historians and civil rights proponents caution against the condensation of a rich life into a single event. Kings later speeches, which include continued references to his dream, proved less prosperous in the North than they had been in the South. I have felt my dreams falter, he said in clams in 1965, and on Christma s Eve 1967, reflecting on his own life, he added a dream reference do famous by poet Langston Hughes I am personally the victim of deferred dreams, of blasted hopes.In his final years, the move imagery of his famous 1963 speech gave way to a more focused advocacy on behalf of African Americans in their struggles for jobs, higher salaries, better working conditions, and integration (Hansen, Kings Dreams E11). King also adamantly opposed the VietnamWar and called for a guaranteed family income. Worried about the dissolution of the civil rights movement, he argued for a more raptorial and disruptive brand of nonviolence, threatened boycotts, and even suggested obstructing the national Democratic and Republican conventions (Transcendent).Because Kings rhetoric is defined by the celebrated dream speech, his later speeches, which do not fit this model, are relatively unremembered. How much I Have a Dream has come to represent Martin Luther King is revealed by the planned national memor ial in Washington, DC, for which ground was recently broken. Situated between the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, the Martin Luther King Memorial will include structures and elements that materially evoke Kings speeches, particularly I Have a Dream. Clayborne Carson, the director of the King Papers Project at Stanford University, offered suggestions for the design selected from among more than 900 submissions.He proposed that Kings public words be used as inspiration for the structures in the outdoors Martin Luther King Jr. s I Have a Dream Speech 189 memorial. Thus the features of the memorial include a mountain of despair and a stone of hope, reflecting a phrase from the speech. There is a fountain meant to symbolize the biblical quotation King used in the speech, the passage that Justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.There are naves, representing the leaders of the civil rights movement, hewn from rock, with rough edges on the outside, and smooth stone on the inside, again an homage to a biblical passage in Kings dream speech (The rough places shall be made canvas and the crooked places shall be made straight) (Konigsmark 1B). The importance of Kings speech in American history is also illustrated by its incorporation at the Lincoln Memorial. Visitors can watch footage of Kings speech and note the spot where King delivered the speech, which is conspicuously marked with an X.Conclusion Historical interest in how King came to include the I have a dream section is comparable to the interest in how Lincoln composed his Gettysburg Address, which has produced tales of fanciful composition on an envelope while en route to Gettysburg. King had been given seven minutes to deliver his speech and his prepared text fit roughly into that time limit until King departed from his text to declare that We will not be satisfied until honourableice runs down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. The voluble affirmation from the audience made King reluctant to continue reading from his manuscript.At this crucial turn, King recast the subdue request that the attendees should go plunk for to our communities with a dynamic series of imperatives Go back to Mississippi. Go back to South Carolina. Go back to Louisiana. Go back to the slums and ghettos of our Northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. Mahalia Jackson, who had earlier render a black spiritual, shouted from behind King Tell em about the dream, Martin.Whether through the vocalists prompting or by his own initiative, King launched nearly seamlessly into the now famous sentences that corporeal his dream (Branch 88182). There are competing accounts of why King chose to depart from his text and prepared conclusion to extemporize the I have a dream refrain. While Corretta said that he had considered including this section beforehand if the moment was right, in a 1963 in terview King remembered that he included it on an impulse I just felt I wanted to use it here.I dont know why. I hadnt thought about it before the speech (Hansen, The Dream). Kings version lends credence to Corettas idea that it was inspired by a higher power (King). Inspired prophecy should not require a prepared text, and extemporaneous speech, like the winged words of Homers heroes, is regarded as more trusty than written ones. 190 ANQ A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews No one, not even King, could look the place his scintillating speech would take in public memory.In 1963 King delivered 350 speeches and sermons. His message and rhetoric were often the same although the size of his audience and the amplitude of his public exposure were never so great. Of course, the speech itself is powerful and memorable, but contextual forces, including the live airing of the speech, Kings assassination, and the enactment of a national holiday celebrating King all contr ibuted to making I Have a Dream a symbol of Kings life, which in turn is a symbol of the civil rights movement.It was and continues to be a media event. It expresses in shorthand the sentiments that the public is supposed to recall. What was a performed text delivered with a political purpose has been translated by the media into a symbolic narrative that casts King as the heroic voice of those for whom the dream had not yet become a reality.