The speech

The story behind Dr Martin Luther King’s Dream

Gary Younge, Guardian Books, 208 pages, paperback, £7.99

The year 1963 marked a turning point in the battle for black civil rights in America.

The struggle was moving from localised ­boycotts, sit-ins and “freedom rides” — when activists rode segregated buses — to major, carefully planned confrontations involving thousands.

Hundreds of thousands of civil rights activists marched through Washington in a demonstration that climaxed with Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech.

Published to coincide with August’s 50th anniversary of King’s famous address, Gary Younge examines what made the speech so timely — and so timeless. Fifty years on, it’s clear that in eliminating segregation — not racism, but formal, codified, explicit discrimination — the civil rights movement delivered the last significant moral victory in America for which there is still a consensus.

The speech’s appeal endures because it remains the most eloquent, poetic, unapologetic and public articulation of that victory.

As the civil rights struggle gave way to Black Power, a new spirit of rebellion and revolution was fermenting.

King planned a second march on Washington, this time for poor people. It was a march he did not live to see.

While he was in Memphis to support a refuse workers’ strike, King was assassinated.

Reviews contributed by the Bookmarks socialist bookshop. Order online at www.bookmarksbookshop.co.uk