Mark Oppenheimer: Why MLK's speeches resonate
[Mr. Oppenheimer, the editor of In Character (www.incharacter.org), is writing a book about contemporary American oratory.]
For most Americans, to watch Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech is to be introduced to something that is wonderfully familiar--we all recognize the words--but also somewhat alien. The dignity with which the men on the dais and the thousands in the audience carry themselves, wearing well-pressed slacks and dresses even in August, make the vintage footage look as old as a V-J Day parade, or even an early talkie. The cadences of the old Southern church tradition are heard less today than 45 years ago. And even many Christians have no firsthand experience with the revival shouts of "All right!" and "Yes, sir!," like those coming from the amen corner behind King.
The speech's foreignness tempts one to see it as the product of an otherworldly genius in King, or maybe something heritable, specific to "the black church" or "the oral tradition." If we're not careful, King can quickly become the homiletic equivalent of the stereotyped black athlete, admired for his "physicality" and "natural ability" but not for intelligence or industry. King almost inadvertently invites such diminution by visibly leaving his prepared text in the 11th minute of "I Have a Dream" and speaking brilliantly without notes for the remainder of the speech. It's like a streetball alley-oop, showing what he can do without even trying.
There is no gainsaying King's natural gifts. But King's speech didn't just bubble forth from some innate Negro musicality. Rather, it demonstrates a savvy understanding of how memorable oratory works, knowledge available even to stutterers and malapropists.
What lifts King's performance from merely brilliant to unforgettable is his use of what we might call resonance. The best speeches are almost never self-contained, wholly original works. They depend for their power on the ability to strike chords that already exist within us. Both Ronald Reagan's 1974 "City on a Hill" speech and Mario Cuomo's 1984 "A Tale of Two Cities" allude directly to John Winthrop's 1630 speech aboard the Arbella. At the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama quoted the Declaration of Independence, and he called people to "a belief in things not seen," which references Hebrews 11: "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." In John F. Kennedy's inaugural speech, he quoted Isaiah and alluded to the angel Gabriel. And so forth....
Read entire article at WSJ
For most Americans, to watch Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech is to be introduced to something that is wonderfully familiar--we all recognize the words--but also somewhat alien. The dignity with which the men on the dais and the thousands in the audience carry themselves, wearing well-pressed slacks and dresses even in August, make the vintage footage look as old as a V-J Day parade, or even an early talkie. The cadences of the old Southern church tradition are heard less today than 45 years ago. And even many Christians have no firsthand experience with the revival shouts of "All right!" and "Yes, sir!," like those coming from the amen corner behind King.
The speech's foreignness tempts one to see it as the product of an otherworldly genius in King, or maybe something heritable, specific to "the black church" or "the oral tradition." If we're not careful, King can quickly become the homiletic equivalent of the stereotyped black athlete, admired for his "physicality" and "natural ability" but not for intelligence or industry. King almost inadvertently invites such diminution by visibly leaving his prepared text in the 11th minute of "I Have a Dream" and speaking brilliantly without notes for the remainder of the speech. It's like a streetball alley-oop, showing what he can do without even trying.
There is no gainsaying King's natural gifts. But King's speech didn't just bubble forth from some innate Negro musicality. Rather, it demonstrates a savvy understanding of how memorable oratory works, knowledge available even to stutterers and malapropists.
What lifts King's performance from merely brilliant to unforgettable is his use of what we might call resonance. The best speeches are almost never self-contained, wholly original works. They depend for their power on the ability to strike chords that already exist within us. Both Ronald Reagan's 1974 "City on a Hill" speech and Mario Cuomo's 1984 "A Tale of Two Cities" allude directly to John Winthrop's 1630 speech aboard the Arbella. At the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama quoted the Declaration of Independence, and he called people to "a belief in things not seen," which references Hebrews 11: "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." In John F. Kennedy's inaugural speech, he quoted Isaiah and alluded to the angel Gabriel. And so forth....