MLK’s speech almost didn’t include ‘I have a dream’

King had suggested the familiar “Dream” speech that he used in Detroit for his address at the march, but his adviser the Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker called it “hackneyed and trite.”

So, the night before the march, King’s staff crafted a new speech, “Normalcy Never Again.”

King was the last speaker to address the crowd in Washington that day. As he spoke, gospel singer Mahalia Jackson called out to King, “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin.”

Then he paused and said, “I still have a dream.”

Walker was out in the audience. “I said, ‘Oh, s—.'”

“I thought it was a mistake to use that,” Walker recalled. “But how wrong I was. It had never been used on a world stage before.”

The rest, of course, is history.