Martin Luther King: I Have a Dream revisited
- 27 August 2013
- From the section Magazine
To mark the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech, BBC Radio 4 asked notable figures to record a recital of the celebrated text.
Listen to it in full below, and see striking images from a period of American history which became a tipping point for social change.
Listen to interviews with the I Have a Dream programme contributors. Below is a full list of the contributors, in addition to Dr Martin Luther King Jr:
Congressman John Lewis: last surviving member of the big six leaders of the American Civil Rights Movement, who spoke at the March on Washington on 28 August 1963; Dr Maya Angelou: American author and poet, Northern coordinator for Dr King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Professor Muhammad Yunus: Nobel peace laureate, and Bangladeshi microcredit economist; Doreen Lawrence: soon to become Baroness Lawrence, the mother of murdered British teenager Stephen Lawrence; Wei Jingsheng: Chinese human rights and democracy campaigner, imprisoned for more than 18 years; Mary Robinson: former UN high commissioner for human rights and the first female president of Ireland; John Hume: awarded the Gandhi Peace Prize, the Martin Luther King Award and jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his contribution to the peace process in Northern Ireland; His Holiness the Dalai Lama: Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader; Albie Sachs: anti-apartheid campaigner, appointed by Nelson Mandela to serve as a judge on the Constitutional Court of South Africa; President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia: first female head of state in Africa, Nobel peace laureate and campaigner for women's rights; Raja Shehadeh: Palestinian lawyer, novelist and political activist; Ndileka Mandela: first granddaughter of Nelson Mandela, reading on his behalf; Ariel Dorfman: Chilean-American novelist, playwright, journalist and human rights activist; David Grossman: Israeli author and peace campaigner; Dr Shirin Ebadi: human rights lawyer, one of Iran's first female judges, first Muslim woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize; Malala Yousafzai: Sixteen-year-old student and education activist from Swat in Pakistan, shot by the Taliban for going to school; Satish Kumar: Indian peace campaigner and environmentalist; Maestro Jose Antonio Abreu: Venezuelan economist, educator and musician, founder of the El Sistema project which harnesses classical music to the cause of social justice; Joan Baez: American songwriter, musician and activist who performed at the 1963 March on Washington; Stevie Wonder: American musician, singer and songwriter, campaigned for Martin Luther King's birthday to become a national US holiday.
Related stories
- The speech in full - text
- How Kennedy tried to stop the Washington March
- 'I was there' - your memories of the speech
Elsewhere on the BBC
- Radio 4 I Have a Dream programme
- Archive of Martin Luther King programmes
- What the speech tells us about Dr King
- Historic figures - Martin Luther King
Radio audio and photo film production by: David Stenhouse, Liza Greig, Nick Balneaves, Paul Kerley, Dave O'Neill, Sophia Domfeh and Mark Bryson.
