“Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy,” he said, making use of a phrase President Kennedy had used in his recent television address. It was an adaptation of a speech he’d given in North Carolina in 1962, one in which he had borrowed phrases and cadences from a Langston Hughes poem called “I Dream a World,” as the scholar W. Jason Miller has written. King mixed poetry, prayer, and patriotism. For another speaker, the result might have been ponderous, but King used these religious and poetic forces to inspire all America to seize this moment of opportunity; to bring peace, love,
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