THE STORY BEHIND THE I HAVE A DREAM SPEECH

Marty just plain felt guilty. He didn't need a reason; he simply felt that way most of the time.

Let me give you an example.

When Marty was twelve, his eleven-year-old brother slid down the banister, shot off the end, and accidentally collided with their grandmother. The impact knocked the old woman out cold. Convinced she was dead, Marty was consumed by a strange and powerful guilt. He blamed himself, perhaps thinking he could have prevented the accident.

He took it so personally that he went upstairs to a bedroom, opened the window, and jumped out. As it turned out, neither Marty nor his grandmother was in the least injured.

But let me explain something further.

Many months later, that same grandmother became ill and was rushed to the hospital. A parade was going on in town that day, and Marty, a boy after all, slipped out to see it. It was during that parade that his grandmother died in the hospital.

Once more, Marty was overcome by irrational guilt. He went home, climbed the stairs to the same bedroom, and jumped out the window again. This was not for show; nobody was watching. And yet, as he had before, Marty fell two stories, picked himself up, dusted himself off completely unhurt, and—most significantly—felt as though he had somehow atoned for his imagined negligence.

I don't think anybody can say for sure, but I have an idea of where this needlessly guilty conscience came from. That's the rest of the story.

When he was six, his two best friends were the grocer’s sons who lived across the street. They spent countless hours together, until one day his mother answered the door. Marty asked, “Can the guys come out and play?”

The woman said her sons were not at home. But Marty had seen them come home only minutes before. He told her so. The woman stiffened.

“All right, Marty,” she said, wanting to be done with it. “The boys are no longer permitted to play with you.”

She gave Marty the reason and slammed the door.

That, quite plausibly, was the day young Marty started feeling guilty for everything—even the things that were not his fault.

You never knew, before these last few minutes, the child who jumped out a second-story window as a personally prescribed penance for sins he never committed. You never knew that little boy who went home crying when he lost what seemed like the two best friends he'd ever have.

But eventually, the little boy grew into a man. He learned not to misplace blame, and more importantly, to place it where it belonged.

You see, the reason the grocer’s wife decided to keep her sons away from Marty—to keep her sons away from six-year-old Martin Luther King Jr.—was the predictable one. The grocer’s family was white, and Martin was not.

You’ll recall that toward the end of his life, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told us he had a dream: a dream that one day his own children would be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

Now you have revisited the day that dream was born.

Because now you know the rest of the story.