Long before his most famous August 28, 1963, speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream. He talked about that dream the previous April at a 16th Street Baptist Church meeting in Birmingham, Alabama, of “seeing Negro boys and girls walking to school with little white boys and girls, playing in the parks together and going swimming together.” He continued that dream at a Cabo Hall speech in Detroit that June that he hoped “Negroes will be able to buy a house or rent a house anywhere that their money will carry them and they will be able to get a job.”
So for his biggest audience at the March on Washington, he didn’t think it was worth dwelling on the dream on that hot summer’s day in the nation’s capital. In fact, the dream wasn’t mentioned in the notes that laid on top of the podium and it wasn’t in the plans for that day.
