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Rockie is pretty early in his rap career, and just like in life, if you are unfamiliar with the game, you can get lost in the shuffle, never able to find your way again
Make you feel so good
So why you sittin' there all alone
When you look so good Jay Electronica – Hard To Get
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Telling the girl how she looks beautiful and how he wants to please her and take her back home – it’s probably Jay’s girl at the time, Erykah Badu
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King was born in Georgia, a state known for its red dirt. The “table of brotherhood” became a lasting line from the speech, inspiring a Chevrolet program nearly four decades later.
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Thomas Jefferson’s famous phrase, located in the Declaration of Independence, had never truly been fulfilled in America due to the country’s historical legacy of slavery, racism, and legal discrimination. King wants to see this phrase finally justified, and urges lawmakers and private citizens alike to recognize that all men are created equal.
King knows that many of the people listening have been through many trials due to racism, and urges them not to wallow in this sorrow. He recognizes the difficulties blacks have been through, and wants his listeners to recognize it too, but he wants them to use the knowledge of this injustice as motivation to make a positive change, not an excuse for inaction.
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The phrase “I have a dream” was not in King’s original text. In fact, the day before his speech, his adviser Wyatt Walker (pictured below) told him,
Don’t use the lines about “I have a dream.” It’s trite, it’s cliche. You’ve used it too many times already.
King had used the phrase in an address just a week earlier at a fundraiser in Chicago, and a few months before in Detroit.
However, as King later recounted:
All of a sudden – the audience response was wonderful that day – and all of a sudden this thing came to me that I have used – I’d used it many times before, that thing about “I have a dream” – and I just felt that I wanted to use it here.
Wyatt Walker’s response as King said this line of the speech?
Aw, shit, he’s using the dream.
Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, who performed both before and after King’s iconic speech, encouraged King to stray from his prepared text as he spoke. (“Tell them about the dream, Martin. Tell them about the dream.” ) The tone and delivery of the speech (as well as the audience’s reception) shifts with his increasingly impassioned improvisation.
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King urges his followers to stick with the movement, and never to give up until true equality is achieved.
He also makes a reference to how the freedom given to blacks by the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment never actually made them free. The Jim Crow laws that remained in place until 1965 dictated that the black American stay a second-class citizen.
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King hopes that one day, everyone can rejoice in their freedom, just as blacks did when they were originally freed from slavery.
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As King previously mentioned, he hopes to give the patriotic song “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” a new meaning, and here he modifies the lyrics a bit to include nearly every part of the U.S., where he hopes there to be freedom.
He starts off in the north and western states, where segregation wasn’t as much of an issue. But he uses the transitional phrase “but not only that”, and begins to mention landmarks in the center of segregation and racism.
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What is this?
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King is referring primarily to Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, whose many followers decried the “white devil” and sought a black nationalist solution to centuries of white oppression.
In just a few months, Malcolm X would deliver his famous “Ballot or the Bullet” speech, in which he called for “action on all fronts by whatever means necessary.”
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