In King’s dream of America:
“every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”
Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech is one of the most well-known and celebrated speeches of the twentieth century, built around one central metaphor, that of the dream. The whole speech is filled with some of the most glorious, soaring imagery of any modern speech.
King uses metaphors deeply rooted in the American psyche: metaphors of religion, money and land. He is appealing to an all-encompassing but specifically American audience. The different metaphors King uses are related to the way they function in the speech. They function in three ways: by drawing the disparate audiences together; by acting as a balance and support to King’s stirring calls to action; and most importantly, by tapping into the American collective imagination. He is reimagining the idea of America as a land of freedom, equality and prosperity for all.
King clearly understood the power of metaphor in rhetoric. In the first sentence he refers to “a great American [Abraham Lincoln], in whose symbolic shadow we stand” (my italics). As an African American leader, he was acutely aware of how he and the wider civil rights movement must appear to white Americans if they are to win over hearts and minds. In fact, King states that the purpose of the march and his speech is “to dramatize an appalling condition”.
Moreover, I believe that King was acutely aware of how metaphors function in rhetoric, that is, he understood the beauty of metaphors: that they are inherently imaginative, but also inherently communicative. Metaphors tap into the collective imagination, not only between the speaker and one audience but also between the speaker and different audiences, because they can be interpreted differently by different audiences.
To show how King’s metaphors function in this speech, let’s take a step back and look at the wider context. Dr. King delivered this speech at the first, large-scale civil rights march on Washington DC on 28th August 1963. The stakes for King couldn’t be higher: his words must appeal to his African American audience, who had suffered so much brutality and struggled for their hard-won rights; but if the civil rights movement was to have a lasting effect, his words must also reach the hearts and minds of his white American audience. As King later wrote, “There was no precedent for a convocation of national scope and gargantuan size … Complicating the situation were innumerable prophets of doom who feared that the slightest incident of violence would alienate Congress and destroy all hope of legislation”.
How do King’s religious metaphors function? Notice first how many of these religious metaphors are metaphors of a journey. King is, therefore, placing this specific civil rights march in the context of the African American journey towards full emancipation. This march is a symbolic but important step on that journey towards their destiny. The metaphorical link between the fate of African Americans and the Israelites in the Old Testament was by this time well-established. For the African American audience, it reaffirms their collective identity as a community who have a God-given right to be free, like the Israelites.
King takes this religious metaphor of the promised land and links it to the “promises of Democracy”. Although emancipation “came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity”, the African American is still “an exile in his own land”. Further, King is taking his audience and his “people”, “from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice” and “from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood”. This journey eventually leads to “into the palace of justice”. These religious metaphors of the journey also reiterate the religious context of the civil rights struggle, appealing to African American and white audiences alike.
Moreover, King’s religious metaphors tell us a lot about what he wanted to achieve in the wider context. Although his use of religious metaphors harkens back to an African American evangelical tradition, they also appeal to a white, predominantly Christian audience. They emphasize King’s intellect and good Christian nature, inverting many white American perceptions of African Americans and allaying their fears about the consequences of the civil rights movement.
But King does not spare his white audience the truth of the indignity and injustice of the African American experience: his images of slavery and the life of African Americans are disquieting and no doubt uncomfortable for many white Americans the time. Linking the image of the slave to injustice, King speaks of the “millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flamed of withering injustice”. At the risk of excluding his white audience, King sometimes speaks directly to the African American audience: calling them “my people”, using the collective term “We” and “our bodies” and describing how “You have been the veterans of creative suffering”. His language here makes it obvious that there is a certain suffering, certain “trials and tribulations”, that only an African American audience member would understand.
Early on in his speech King briefly uses the metaphor of a “bad cheque” as a bridge to his more provocative arguments. Just as he later links religious metaphors to metaphors of land, King depicts the “sacred obligation” of the Constitution towards America’s “citizens of color” as being dishonoured. And, King states, they have come to Washington “to cash the cheque”. King uses the metaphor of the “bad cheque” as a bridge to his more provocative arguments. “We”, he states, “refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.” It is a simple, universally understood metaphor. The idea of money and debt is deeply rooted in the American psyche: prosperity is also integral to the idea of the American dream, the metaphor at the heart of King’s speech.
The metaphor of the dream is an appeal to all Americans. This is “a dream deeply rooted in the American dream”. King develops the idea of the civil rights movement from a specifically religious destiny and develops it into a universal metaphor for the destiny of America. After placing the struggle for civil rights in a religious context (a specifically American religious context), King places the desire for a better future for African Americans in the context of the American dream. The emancipation of African Americans is not to be feared, but to be celebrated.
Deeply intertwined with King’s religious imagery, the metaphor of the dream functions in two distinct but interconnected ways.
For his African American audience, the metaphor of the dream would have been deeply familiar in the context of civil rights. The phrase “I have a dream” was first uttered in this context by Prathia Hall, a theologian and a civil rights leader at a service attended by King in 1962. Interestingly, it was in the context of a prayer that she, apparently spontaneously and repeatedly, uttered the phrase “I have a dream”. It is interesting to note that the image of the dream in connection with discrimination and emancipation was familiar in the African American collective imagination.
But the metaphor of the American dream was also deeply rooted in the wider American collective imagination. The metaphor of the “dream” strengthens his call to action but is crucially inclusive of all Americans. King is reimagining the American dream to include all citizens. His metaphors, with their different but deeply connected effect upon the collective imagination of all Americans, are integral to this appeal. He is appealing directly to the collective imagination of all American and then turning this imagination outwards, onto the idea of American democracy and then the American landscape.
King finally combines the religious metaphors and his dream, building an imagined landscape of a better America. From the “red hills of Georgia” to “Mississippi, a desert state sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, [which] will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice”. King is reimagining America, asking his audience to carve out a new American landscape, hewn “out of the mountain of despair”.
“And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.
Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California. But not only that; let freedom ring from the Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.
Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!””
Feature image: Unknown Author, via Wikimedia Commons
