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Within two years of the march, King was saying that his optimistic dream of 1963 had turned into a "nightmare.''.King employed the phrase, and the oratory it framed, a week earlier in Chicago two months earlier at a mass rally in Detroit and several other times in the previous year or so. The march was far from the first time King told an audience, "I have a dream."."It was King's dream - not his march," said Eric Arnesen, a George Washington University civil rights movement historian. King was just one of several march leaders. Philip Randolph, who had advocated a similar rally in 1941 to demand equal opportunity in the war effort. The march was officially led by the black labor leader A. The rally was not, as often described, "Martin Luther King's March on Washington.".Rarely has such a famous speech been surrounded by so many myths and misconceptions, according to historians who have studied the march and people who attended it. But all many people know or remember is King, preaching a gospel of hope from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. two years after the first Freedom Rides on interstate buses through the South and three months after police in Birmingham, Ala., horrified the nation by using attack dogs and fire hoses against women and children protesting segregated public facilities.Īt least 250,000 people had jammed the National Mall to demand "jobs and freedom," including passage of a civil rights bill. It was the heart of the civil rights movement - eight years after the anti-segregation Montgomery bus boycott three years after the lunch-counter sit-ins in Nashville and Greensboro, N.C. 28, 1963, at the biggest, most important civil rights demonstration in American history. He came to rue the phrase, and by the time he died, the speech had faded from public memory. The march wasn't King's first use of the "dream" refrain. There are other things that most of us don't know about this storied speech. Having written a good speech - a working title was "Normalcy - Never Again" - King instead gave one of the greatest of the 20th century. That refrain, and the part of the address it punctuated and propelled, was improvised on the spot. took the lectern at the March on Washington 50 years ago to deliver his "I Have a Dream" speech, the text in his hand didn't contain the words "I have a dream."