ABSTRACT
In an interview with Reuters marking the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Dr Martin Luther King’s profoundly influential 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, Clarence Jones, Dr King’s speechwriter and attorney, remarked that the celebrated words “I have a dream” “were not written in the text that King prepared and began to read that day” (Bernstein, 2013). Instead, Jones recalls, Dr King went off script in response to a prompt from gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, and improvised what has arguably become the most famous political speech in world history, a speech that would “change the course of race relations in the United States” (Bernstein, 2013).
