His advisers discouraged him from using the same theme again, and he had apparently drafted a version of the speech that didn’t include it. King had debuted the phrase “I have a dream” in his speeches at least nine months before the March on Washington, and used it several times since then. America must not remain silent.”ģ.) King almost didn’t deliver what is now the most famous part of the speech. “America must not become a nation of onlookers. “A great people who had created a great civilization had become a nation of silent onlookers,” Prinz said of his experience as a rabbi in Berlin during the horrors perpetrated by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime.

Joachim Prinz, the president of the American Jewish Congress, spoke directly before King. The UAW helped fund the March on Washington, and Reuther would later march alongside King from Selma to Montgomery to protest for Black voting rights. The most prominent white speaker was Walter Reuther, head of the United Automobile Workers, a powerful labor union. Philip Randolph and a young John Lewis, the future congressman from Georgia. King was preceded by nine other speakers, notably including civil rights leaders like A. “This we pledge to the women of America.”Ģ.) A white labor leader and a rabbi were among the 10 speakers on stage that day. “We will sit-in and we will kneel-in and we will lie-in if necessary until every Negro in America can vote,” Bates said. Bates spoke briefly in the place of Myrlie Evers, widow of the murdered civil rights leader Medgar Evers, and Parks and several others were recognized and asked to take a bow. But at the urging of Anna Hedgeman, the only woman on the planning committee, the organizers added a “Tribute to Negro Women Fighters for Freedom” to the program. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech now stands out as one of the 20th century’s most unforgettable moments, but a few facts about it may still surprise you.ġ.) There were initially no women included in the event.ĭespite the central role that women like Rosa Parks, Ella Baker, Daisy Bates and others played in the civil rights movement, all the speakers at the March on Washington were men.

WATCH: The Power of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 'I Have A Dream' Speech

In the end, more than twice that number flooded into the nation’s capital for the massive protest march, making it the largest demonstration in U.S. Organizers of the event, officially known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, had hoped 100,000 people would attend. delivered his now-famous “I Have a Dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. On August 28, 1963, in front of a crowd of nearly 250,000 people spread across the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the Baptist preacher and civil rights leader Rev.

I dream martin luther king