His ‘I Have a Dream’ Oration Belongs to All Americans

This month will mark the 35th anniversary of the March on Washington and the debut of the speech most associated with it, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” address. Even if you weren’t old enough to remember seeing the original speech on television, you doubtless will remember watching it in retrospectives of American history or in the celebrated PBS series on the civil rights movement, “Eyes on the Prize.”

“I have a dream” was a fine piece of oratory, drawing on King’s sweeping vision of Americans joined by love of country and of their fellow citizens, the beloved community of which he spoke so frequently, undivided by the barriers of social caste, color, gender or religion. That wish list was delivered in the classic cadence of the Southern preacher, great waves of metaphors washing over the sweltering crowds. The verbal pictures King painted of freedom ringing “from the mighty mountains of New York . . . the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania . . . from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado . . . the curvaceous slopes of California . . . from Stone Mountain of Georgia” and “every hill and molehill of Mississippi” are still vivid today. It is a speech that belongs to history, to the ages.

King’s survivors say it belongs to them. When CBS, in conjunction with the Arts & Entertainment Network, decided to include a segment of the 1963 march with excerpts of King’s speech in “The 20th Century With Mike Wallace,” King’s family sued for copyright infringement. (The speech had been copyrighted, though some days after it was given and the text had been distributed widely to the news media.) The family argued that King’s speeches and writings were private property, the only legacy left them, and they were determined to not see it squandered.

CBS protested that the speech had been news, had been covered as news and was part of the public domain. Judge William C. O’Kelley, ruling for the Federal District Court in Atlanta, agreed.

So do I. “I have a dream” came at a pivotal point in America’s evolution, at a time when the country had to decide between two clear-cut moral alternatives. It stands, with perhaps half a dozen other addresses, as one of the high-water marks in modern history. Like Winston Churchill’s “This was their finest hour” or FDR’s “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” speeches, “I have a dream” acknowledged crisis, pointed out that the task ahead was a difficult one that might be achieved at great cost and insisted that there was only one right way to react.

While King was not an elected official like Roosevelt and Churchill, whose words are, automatically, part of the public domain, “I have a dream” is similar in memorable impact, and it should be available to as many people as possible, for as long as possible. Without charge.

Civil rights leaders didn’t make much money doing the work they did. Consequently, civil rights martyrs often left their families rich in memories and veneration, but poor in working capital. Like her sisters in sorrow, Myrlie Evers and the late Betty Shabazz, Coretta King has had to keep her family together spiritually and financially. Her children feel their father’s words can assist in that. And certainly, if anyone should be able to profit from King’s work, it should be his family. But where should the line be drawn?

Joel L. Hecker, a New York lawyer who specializes in copyright law, says that today’s copyright legislation, passed in 1978, well after King’s famous address, protects authors without requiring them to physically register their works, a big step in sheltering intellectual property. But “fair use” stipulation assumes that “most uses will be part of an educational or newsworthy event.” As “I have a dream” falls within those guidelines, “most legitimate uses would fall under the educational aspect of fair use,” Hecker said.

Argue, if you like, over the remainder of King’s more clearly copyrighted materials; but this soaring vision of possibility should be left, free, to whomever can make use of it to inspire, prod and cajole us to reach the summit he so eloquently pictured.