King's powerful speech is rarely heard these days

King obtained rights to his most famous speech a month after he gave it.
washington post
WASHINGTON -- It is the time of year when students are taught about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech, so passionately delivered that his call for freedom changed U.S. history. Once heard, it is impossible to forget.
But many pupils won't get to hear it -- and most who do will hear only snippets, educators and historians said. And that, they said, is affecting the legacy of the pre-eminent civil rights leader, whose life is honored today with an annual federal holiday.
"It lessens the historical saliency of King for younger kids," said Robert Brown, assistant dean of undergraduate education at Emory University in Atlanta who specializes in blacks in politics. "It is one thing to read King and another to see him. Hearing him is so much more powerful than reading it."
H. Patrick Swygert, president of Howard University, heard King on the Mall in Washington at the end of a day of marching and speeches in 1963. Tired listeners were respectful at the beginning, he said, but began to stir at the rhythm of King's words, the intensity of his voice and the power of the message, which was not just a description of the condition of blacks in America but a vision of something better.
"It is doubly sad for people today who do not hear the speech," Swygert said. "It certainly was one of the great moments of American oratory. But young people today don't often hear the message of possibility, and the second half of the speech was all about possibility."
Owned by family
All of King's speeches and papers are owned by his family, which has gone to court several times since the 1990s to protect its copyright; King obtained rights to his most famous speech a month after he gave it. Now, those who want to hear or use the speech in its entirety must buy a copy sanctioned by the King family, which receives the proceeds.
The King family is not alone in its decision to control the use of his work. Former President Nixon sold his papers to the U.S. government for $18 million. The Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate story sold their papers to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin for $5 million.
But President Kennedy's inaugural address is in the public domain. And like Kennedy, King gave one of history's seminal speeches. Delivered Aug. 28, 1963, before more than 200,000 people, the speech helped change the minds of U.S. policymakers who had been resisting calls for changing laws that permitted segregation.