Martin Luther King’s Big Surprise

On this day in 1963, at a mass gathering on the Mall in Washington, D.C., Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a speech that would become a beacon of the civil rights movement and that historians would rank with the greatest oratory in the nation’s history. Yet as he took the podium, he had no idea he was about to deliver an address for the ages. The most memorable parts of the speech weren’t even in his written text.