A Moment of Genius

The USA has produced four political statements that resonated all over the world: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, the Founders' Constitution and Bill of Rights, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and, in my generation, Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. There are two memories from my youth that I treasure. One is shaking hands with JFK. The other is standing on a slope at UCLA with about 50 other students as MLK talked to us in the open air. The curious thing, which I learned from TV this morning, was that when King stood up to deliver his most famous written speech before a huge audience, the talk contained no reference to his dream, which some of his friends had heard him talk about. But the speech, as written, was not working, and Mahalia Jackson said to him, "Tell them about the dream, Martin." King went off script and began to improvise.