Martin Luther King's I Have A Dream Speech

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Recommended: Selma the movie essay

On this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, tens of thousands of middle schoolers and high schoolers were given free tickets to see Selma, a Golden Globe nominated movie about the man’s life. Twenty seven thousand tickets were given away in New York alone, and ten thousand in Chicago. The filmmakers tried to bring out King’s humanity, bringing out the man from who he is today. The director, Ava DuVernay commented “He’s a holiday, he’s a stamp, he’s a street name in black neighborhoods, he’s an elementary school in some parts of the city, he’s a catch phrase: ‘I have a dream.’” Dr. King is certainly a staple of our society, but I believe that he is also very significant in it. His vision of hope and his actions of peace is still our best example of …show more content…

King uses a powerful image of justice taken from the Bible to illustrate the injustice of the society he was protesting against. The final thing he dreams about is how “one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight.” This selection from Isaiah 40 helps show the Biblical version of justice, and also how it plays into our modern society. The people of the mid-twentieth century were being treated unequally based on the color of their skin, and the equality that they strived for was the same equality that the ancient Hebrew people looked for thousands of years ago. Unfortunately, we are still looking for it. Throughout the world, people are assigned worth by their communities based on things that are not the content of their character. From social shunnings in the classrooms of the Western world to the closure of classrooms by extremist government, valleys and mountains arise in spite of our best attempts to stamp them out. Crooked cops and rough living situations still exist. Looking around, it can seem that this Biblical ideal that Dr. King and Isaiah proposed has died a shivering blue death, left out in the cold by a society which does not care. But to me, this ideal is not to be reached, but to be carried, held close to the warmth of the heart as you stride onwards with unyielding

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