The Context of the "Dream"

One of the English classes at South Lakes High School analyzed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous speech, "I Have a Dream," in anticipation of yesterday’s holiday. Only two of the students in the class understood the biblical references of the speech, which provides the context and the cadences, and really, the power behind the words.

“You can’t understand King’s rhetoric without knowing his context,” said Tom Berlin, the senior pastor of Floris United Methodist Church. King was primarily a Baptist preacher, following his father and grandfather as pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, GA.

King went from being a leader of the church to a leader of the civil rights movement, and his words didn’t change. “If you read his sermons and read his speeches,” said Berlin, “there’s not a huge divergence. You can hear the Baptist preacher in both.”

Black preaching is a defined tradition, studied in seminary schools as a section of homiletics, the study of how different voices in our cultures approach preaching. As Berlin explains it, while white preaching is very deductive and logical, in the black preaching tradition, there is much emphasis placed not only on how words are written, but how they’re said. “There’s an expression, there’s repetition. You hit this cadence of repetition, and they’re trying to get to a place where they light a fire.”

In his book Black Preaching, Rev. Dr. Henry H. Mitchell calls this point of the sermon the “Black climax.” It is a shift from objectivity to subjectivity. It is a celebration and positive reinforcement. “'I Have a Dream’ will never be forgotten,” he writes, “not because of its intellectual soundness, but because it moved the heart of all America, stirring the highest emotions to the noblest of all intentions by means of the power of God channeled through the best of the Black climax tradition.” 

When King took to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to confront a nation about the injustices of segregation and bigotry, his preaching converged with public discourse. He “calls out the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, the source documents of American democracy, as well as invoking the image of Moses going to the Holy Land,” said Berlin.

In his book, Mitchell also attests to the “effectiveness of the combination of social action and relevance with deep awareness of the presence of God,” noting that “many from outside Black culture found themselves caught up in and blessed by the experience… Emotions move people, while ideas which do not generate some emotion are powerless to change anybody’s life.”

In a speech that is universally recognized as some of the finest rhetoric our country has seen, it’s hard to separate the preacher from the politician. “What’s he’s saying is: ‘Your sacrifice is worth it because one day our children are going to play in the backyard with the white children,’” said Berlin. “He’s not saying we’re going to rule the whites. He’s saying we just want a piece of justice here. Now, [it's] fascinating what he does: is that a Christian dream or an American dream?”