By this point, it was clear that King’s dream and the hope it represented were beginning to fade from the American consciousness. In fact, in 1966—just three years after his “I Have a Dream” speech—King himself expressed his disillusionment in an interview with CBS’s Mike Wallace. It was in this interview that he called riots “the language of the unheard.” “And what is it that America has failed to hear?” he added. “It has failed to hear that the economic plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years.”
