Mr Big Food’s Dad emailed me this afternoon. He’d read the previous post on the Smithsonian’s re-write of King’s Dream speech. Mr. Big Food’s Dad says,

You can see the original speech by googling George Raveling…He has the original document MLK gave him at the conclusion of the speech 50 years ago…He was one of MLK’s security guards on the podium that day…He later became a major college basketball coach…Spent quite a few years at USC…

What I found by doing as Mr. Big Food’s Dad suggested.

Read what Raveling says. What I surmise is this. Every good speaker has something more than notes– he has an outline, some words, some turns of phrase he writes to help commit to memory. Remember, King was a Preacher. He begins with his prepared remarks and then as Raveling says, goes with the flow. 

“And as he began delivering the prepared text he saw that he was really capturing the crowd. That’s when Mahalia Jackson began egging him on. If you listen carefully to the speech you can her a woman’s voice in the back saying, ‘Please Martin tell them about the Dream.’ She was saying it constantly. It was like going to church on Sunday at a black church and people are making little remarks. From that point on he didn’t read the speech, he only used it as a guidepost.”

The document at the Archives is the speech that King copyrighted in 1963. (It says so at the top.) It’s King’s own cleaned up version of what he said. That’s how people who give speeches do things. They have an outline. They talk. And then they go fill in the blanks so if you weren’t actually there, you’ll get the message.

The SI version of King’s speech is a complete aberration.


Mr. Big Food’s Dad says, “Too bad so many things get changed by revisionist historians.”

Indeed.