The church was a meeting place for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which Hall joined in 1962.
Hall watching the house of worship reduced to nothing as no firefighters showed up to save Mount Olive.Ī huge but orderly crowd heard Prathia Hall (foreground, left), a staff worker of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee in Selma, Alabama, deliver a powerful 20 minute address on conditions in the Southern Cities as blacks strive for racial equality, during a massive demonstration on Parliament Hill protesting racial violence in the United States.(Photo by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images) It was burned to the ground by the Ku Klux Klan. Even the exalted “I Have A Dream” repetition was inspired by a fellow preacher, Prathia Hall, an activist who led a prayer group in Sasser, Georgia on September 10, 1962, the holy ground where the Mount Olive Baptist Church stood a day prior. They were written over a number of years, the speech and its themes evolving out of a variety of sources beyond the Holy Bible, “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” and the Emancipation Proclamation. King’s speech is a foundational text of the American experiment, but the words were not handed down from on high. Of the #1 declamation, Martin Medhurst, professor of speech communication at Texas A&M said, “ eloquent vision of a day when his own children ‘would live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character’ persuasively articulated the American dream within the context of the civil rights struggle.”ĭr. Martin Luter King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech, delivered of course, during the August 1963 March on Washington. The experts were asked to evaluate the silver-tongued on the basis of social and political impact, and rhetorical artistry.
At the dawn of the 21st-century, researchers at University of Wisconsin–Madison and Texas A&M University sought the opinions of 137 scholars of American oratory on the best speech of the 20th-century.
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