A Songbird celebrates "I Have A Dream" Day!

Happy "I Have A Dream" Day!



Let's not forget that MLK's "I have a dream" speech burst forth at the urging of a SINGER, Mahalia Jackson, and I have always considered his speech to be a form of call-and-response to HER singing earlier in the program, which she prompted by reminding him of "the dream."



"Then A. Philip Randolph, the 74-year-old initiator of the march, who had secured an executive order on nondiscrimination in defense-industry employment and contracts by pressuring President Franklin D. Roosevelt with a threat of a march on Washington in 1941, introduced the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. She sang two spirituals, “I Been ’Buked and I Been Scorned” and “How I Got Over.” King was seated nearby, clapping his hands on his knees and calling out to her as she sang. Roger Mudd, covering the event for CBS News, said after the first song: “Mahalia Jackson. And all the speeches in the world couldn’t have brought the response that just came from the hymns she sang. Miss Mahalia Jackson.” Then, after a speech by Rabbi Joachim Prinz, from the American Jewish Congress, it was King’s turn to speak.

King read from his prepared text for most of his speech, which relied on the Bible, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence — just as President John F. Kennedy had a few months earlier, when he called for civil rights legislation in a nationally televised address: “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.”

As King neared the end, he came to a sentence that wasn’t quite right. He had planned to introduce his conclusion with a call to “go back to our communities as members of the international association for the advancement of creative dissatisfaction.” He skipped that, read a few more lines, and then improvised: “Go back to Mississippi; go back to Alabama; go back to South Carolina; go back to Georgia; 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.”

Nearby, off to one side, Mahalia Jackson shouted: “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” King looked out over the crowd. As he later explained in an interview, “all of a sudden this thing came to me that I have used — I’d used many times before, that thing about ‘I have a dream’ — and I just felt that I wanted to use it here.” He said, “I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.” And he was off, delivering some of the most beloved lines in American history, a speech that he never intended to give and that some of the other civil rights leaders believed no one but the marchers would ever remember..."

quoted from: The New York Times, Opinion Page

Op-Ed Contributor
Mahalia Jackson, and King’s Improvisation
By DREW HANSEN
Published: August 27, 2013


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/28/opinion/mahalia-jackson-and-kings-rhetorical-improvisation.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0



Hear Mahalia at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT0SUMSjMWw
"Mahalia Jackson Mlk Washington march"