264: Talk Talk - MLK's I Have a Dream Speech

So what made Martin Luther King Jr. such a powerful speaker? We've been talking about him for decades for a reason. And on today's show, I'm gonna nerd out with you on some of the persuasive genius of Martin Luther King Jr. and how he became arguably the most impactful, world-changing speaker that we have ever known. No. Hey movers, it's Sally Z with Be Moved. Let's go create some talks that will move this world. We're going to talk with amazing speakers, share tips, tricks, resources, and we are going to be moved so that our audience can be moved.

This moved me.

What is moving you? Hey everybody, my name is Sally Zimney. I am your virtual speaker coach and I empower purpose-driven entrepreneurs, coaches, and changemakers like you to leverage the power of speaking, the power of your voice, the power of your story so that you can have a bigger impact and step more confidently into your authority. In other words, I want to help you persuade more effectively. To move your audience. And today is MLK Day, my friends. Now, this is always an important day to me, but especially after this past year where it was re-brought in front of our face in such an important and needed and powerful way that we still have a lot of work to do on racial equity. I wanted to really deep dive with you today this. Now, MLK of course has a huge legacy to offer all of us that we are still benefiting from, that is still challenging us, and one of his legacies is of course around his ability to speak and persuade.

Duh!

Like, the persuasive speaker of the last century, for a really good reason. I love to look at MLK's speaking because most of us don't actually speak like him. I mean, he, he's a, he's a, he's a preacher. Like, he is preaching. But there are some elements to his speaking that we can adopt, or at least look to and aim for. We're not going to try and speak like MLK, but we're going to look at his approach and say, now that is mastery, that is beautiful, and we could take elements of that to integrate more into our approach as well. We're like his use of rhythm and poetry, metaphor. He makes these big, giant, important, sometimes challenging ideas emotive and articulates nuance. Mmm, we could use some nuance. He moved people, and that is what it is all about. Well, Lucky for you, I got my master's in persuasion. It's a thing. And what that means is I spent a lot of time looking at different speeches and why they worked or they didn't. So today I get to nerd out with you by looking at the ultimate in persuasive speech, and that is Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech. Now before we dive in, I want I'm gonna take a moment and talk with you about what's happening over on the Move Your Audience Facebook group. This free Facebook group has been so much fun. It is a daily source of inspiration and connection, support, empowerment, encouragement, which we all need, that's great. But it's also the place where we go slightly deeper, weekly lives, we do some trainings, and we do occasional challenges. And right now we have a really fun challenge going on. It's called the #BeVisible Challenge, and it is all about encouraging us in a really fun, low-key way to get out front more, to be visible, my friends, because we've got to be visible if we want to move our audience. We can't do it from the sidelines. We need to hashtag #ShowUpAnyway. I don't think that's a new hashtag out there, but I feel like I just created it. Hashtag #ShowUpAnyway. So I am approaching this challenge in a super fun and low-key way that will really help you take action, but you got to find out more over in the Facebook group. Links are below. We're going to help you be visible. Now let's get into this historic, beautiful speech. Let's set the stage. MLK is speaking in front of the Lincoln Memorial and MLK decides to use that at the beginning of his speech, right away, to help set the tone and the context for the historical need for this. We have been dealing with this for a long time.

Fivescore years ago, a great American in whose symbolic shadow we stand today signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. But 100 years later, the Negro still is not free. 100 years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of slavery. Segregation and the chains of discrimination. 100 years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. 100 years later, right away he sets out with this powerful message.

About the promissory note, right? He says 100 years later we have defaulted on the note with insufficient funds.

In a sense, we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, They were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back Mark insufficient funds.

Ooh, and everybody stops for a moment and cheers, and here's why. Insufficient funds kind of gets you right there, and they're like, yes, because he's digging into this feeling that's underneath the frustration. Insufficient funds feels right, and that's the trick with a metaphor. The metaphor makes us feel.

But we refuse to believe that the Bank of Justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

Then he can use the metaphor with all this language like bank of justice. And the best metaphors allow us to speak within the framework of the metaphor. We're talking within the idea. We're using the metaphor to reveal all these powerful layers to the meaning, to the complexity, to the nuance about it, and it helps us understand things more easily and attach to it more easily. One of the things that MLK does throughout this entire talk is, of course, using repetition. There is some beautiful poetic language. When that sort of poetic language is also layered with repetition, the strength of this repetition that comes at it like the fierce urgency of now.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time. To make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time.

Where he says, "Now." There is strength to that word, and those two things combined together are important because if we just have beautiful language and we don't ever have any teeth with it— we need the beauty and the artistry of the poetry, but then we also need those moments that wake us up and bust through. So after he gets buy-in with the feelings, then we're like, "Yes, I'm resonating. I'm feeling the problem." I understand we are on the same page. We have established this really wonderful common ground. And then he says, caution.

Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. Amen. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The martyr—

He gives us caution. And that's a really important tactic to use. It clues an audience in about the boundaries. We have to establish those boundaries as speakers, otherwise it becomes manipulation. It actually creates trust. Together we are building the framework for a different way of being. He uses all this beautiful alliteration. The dignity, and discipline. I love alliteration.

I love alliteration. It's so good. We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one.

So I have to tell you, I got kind of emotional when he starts listing out the, the pain. He starts listing out the wrongs that are happening, and of course the first thing he talks about is police brutality. Now I have to say I've listened to this speech many, many times, and when he talked about police brutality, listening to that in 2020, I was like, "Oh God, we are still there." But what he's doing in this part of the speech, he's naming the wrongs. He is bringing us to details. Okay, and persuasively, in terms of a persuasive structure, we can start with this wide spectrum, this bringing everybody onto the same page. We pull people in emotively. That's really, really important. And then we can start giving what's sometimes called evidence. Now, he's not listing evidence. He doesn't need to list evidence, but he's talking about specifics. This is where your specifics live. Right at this meaty part in the middle.

So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day This nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

This is about where you see him leave his script behind. Once he leaves his script behind, this is what he is famous for, this part of the speech, the "I have a dream" section of the speech as he moves towards the end of this talk. And did you know that that was unplanned? I want to say I'm not sure it was actually improvised because it had been scripted at some point in the past. This was an idea that he had shared before, so he had already done some writing and some speaking with this idea. And I think that's important to know because he didn't just come up with that on the spot and was like, you know, amazing on his feet, although he was amazing on his feet. So we're holding both of those things in reality together right there, that it was unplanned and he had prepared. And as speakers, when we see a speaker out there and just absolutely killing it, it seems so off the cuff. Maybe they said that before 100 other times in other ways. It's much easier to be off the cuff when you have vetted your content, when you have already done the work of editing it towards this beautiful point that you know lands well. So he's not trying it out for the first time in front of a million people in the Lincoln Memorial. No, he is bringing to us an idea that has already been vetted and knows has some legs, but I don't want to take any credit away from him in that moment because it is hard in that moment to leave your script behind.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed in all flesh. We shall see it together. This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith.

But once he leaves that script behind, he unleashes. And that is why we are talking about the speech right now. And letting the emotion come from deep in his body, and you can see it all of a sudden, he uses his arms in any way, and all of a sudden he is like reaching out to people and drawing on their emotion, and it is flowing through him.

This will be the day. This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning, my country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside let freedom ring. And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California. But not only that, let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last.

At the end, his cadence and his repetition and all the things that we've talked about—the metaphor, the poetry, the repetition, All of that comes to play all together at the end when he talks about letting freedom ring, and it's almost a song. He's almost singing it. Here we are almost 60 years later. As a white woman, I can't really speak to the reality that my Black, Brown, friends, loved ones, strangers, fellow Americans, what they live in every day and what they deal with, because I don't know and I can't fully understand. But this speech helps me feel like a part of the solution and that I need to be. And that is persuasion. That is why we do what we do. I know we're not all speakers on racial equity, we're not all out there and saying, okay, this talk is going to be seen by a million people, millions, billions of people like this talk has, but in our own world, in our own sphere, of influence, your message, your voice. We wanted to do something. You want to persuade people, otherwise what are we doing? That is the point, to open people's minds or hearts or ways of being, their thinking. And so what I hope you take from this is permission to let emotion drive your talk, to use metaphors in a way that help illuminate your idea and allow people to feel something with you, to understand your concept in a new way, and to pull it apart in a way that they can like take it with them when you're done. To use our words thoughtfully, with intention and passion and poetry, and also know that there might be moments where you're gonna let it all go. You're gonna let, for lack of a better phrase, you're gonna let the spirit move within you and bring what you know works out front. Not wing it, but there are those moments— this audience needs to hear this in this moment. And what that requires from us is to be really truly present, to be loose with our plan enough that we can respond to what is really happening in the moment. I don't know if you knew this. This was new to me as I was doing some research about this, about that moment where he, he lets go of the script and leans on this "I Have a Dream" content that he had used before. And I guess someone who was up on the stage with him said, "Tell them about the dream." And he felt that. He was like, "Yeah, this is, this is what needs to be said right now." And I am grateful for his trust in himself and his confidence and his willingness to make good on his purpose and use his voice. Happy Martin Luther King Day to you. My hope is you will do something today to better the world and bring more equity and justice. Use your words, your voice, your story to move the world. For good. See you next week.