This episode was originally broadcast in 2013.

Major Founding for Backstories provided by an anonymous donor, the National Dama for the Humanities,

and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

From Virginia Humanities, this is Backstories.

I have the pleasure to present to you Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

You'd be hard-pressed today to find someone who doesn't recognize the phrase, I have a dream.

But it's worth noting that those four words, I have a dream, didn't come until the very end of King's speech that day.

David Blight is a historian at Yale University, and he says the first 14 minutes of his speech were all about the past, not the future.

And he says it's important to remember that the very same time that King gave his speech, the nation was marking the centennial of the Civil War.

Five score years ago, a great American in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

Of course, he starts with five score because he's drawing off the famous four score of the Gettysburg Address.

He's reminding the country that this was 1963, the 100th anniversary year of the Emancipation Proclamation,

and that, as he says, four times as a refrain in the first paragraph of the dream speech, and the Negro is not free, and the Negro is not free.

The Negro still is not free.

100 years later.

He's there asking the United States to live up to its creeds.

And of course, those creeds are stated in the Declaration of Independence, which he draws on.

And then it's restated, reinvented in a way, in the Emancipation Proclamation and the constitutional amendments that came out of the Civil War.

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promise or a note.

In the second paragraph, he draws on what he called the promise or a note, which had come back.

He says, labeled insufficient funds in the Bank of American Justice.

That's an unforgettable power from metaphor.

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