I HAVE A DREAM AND BEEN TO THE MOUNTAIN TOP

I am writing this on the 50th anniversary of what has come to be called the "I Have A Dream" 11 min.  speech by Martin Luther King* on August 28th, 1963.  I presume that all of us have heard that the "I Have A Dream" part of the speech was ad libbed in response to Mahalia Jackson's plea for him to tell them about the dream, but perhaps few of us know that he had given that part of the speech earlier in Detroit at an event called "The Great March On Detroit" (June 23, 1963) estimated at 125,000 participants which may be what Jackson was referring to.**

Another speech that greatly affected me was his "Been To The Mountain Top" speech, his last, on April 3, 1968.***  This speech was 43 min. long and also had the cadences called "somewhere I have read."  He was assassinated the next day (April 4, 1968).  I presume there will be another big event for this speech in five years.

I don't know that I have heard the full context of either of these speeches, but, what I have heard, has had a powerful effect on me.  If you wish to hear either of these speeches, the YouTube reverences are given below.

I flew to Washington, D.C. on April 4th of 1968 to go to an American Geophysical Union meeting, and was to stay in the National Hotel (not the famous one and probably defunct now), a small low-cost hotel available at special rates to Civil Servants on per diem.  It was just a few blocks from the 14th street riots, and you could see the red sky from the hotel.  As I went into the hotel, I wondered if I had always been nice to the Black doorman.  I checked in and went to my room and to bed, thinking that I wouldn't wake up in the morning.  But I did wake up and was absolutely amazed that nothing had happened to the hotel.  There were National Guard soldiers posted all around, and you couldn't get a drink anywhere.  There was a rumor that you could get a drink at the Yenching Palace in Cleveland Park (no longer exists).  My memory (perhaps faulty) is that I walked there, but it would be a long way from downtown where the meetings were held.  However I got there, the rumors were correct.  This restaurant was famous for being the place where the Cuban Missile Crisis was negotiated.  Though the riots were said to last for 5 days, I don't remember worrying about them after April 5th.

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_a_Dream; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRIF4_WzU1w
** http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_speech_at_the_great_march_on_detroit
*** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I've_Been_to_the_Mountaintop; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oehry1JC9Rk; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixfwGLxRJU8 entire speech.