Speaker 1: Pushkin. One late summer day in nineteen sixty three, thousands
Speaker 1: upon thousands of people gathered on the Mall in Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. They had come to America's capital for jobs
Speaker 1: and freedom, to show the Kennedy administration that civil rights
Speaker 1: legislation must be pushed through Congress, and to hear the
Speaker 1: Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior speak. The official program
Speaker 1: had been long and packed with speeches, but a quarter
Speaker 1: of a million people defied the heat as they waited.
Speaker 1: The crowd stretched back from the Lincoln Memorial, packing the
Speaker 1: sides of the famous reflecting pool, swirling around the base
Speaker 1: of the Washington Monument, and extending towards be in transigent
Speaker 1: capital itself. The Mall usually dwarfs anything on a human scale.
Speaker 1: Not that afternoon. The gospel singer Mahalia Jackson sang, I've
Speaker 1: been buked and I've been scorned. Anticipation was building. All
Speaker 1: three television networks switched to live coverage. Doctor King stepped
Speaker 1: forward to speak to address not only the sweltering crowd,
Speaker 1: but a national audience he had never had before and
Speaker 1: might never have again. Doctor King had spent the night
Speaker 1: laboring on his speech with a few trusted aids, weighing
Speaker 1: every word of what he would say. For a few minutes,
Speaker 1: the nation, even the world, would be focused on those
Speaker 1: words from the Lincoln Memorial steps. Doctor King knew that
Speaker 1: those words had to be perfect. But now let's leave
Speaker 1: this iconic scene behind us and travel across time and
Speaker 1: across the Atlantic. Twenty eight years later, a very different
Speaker 1: man would give a very different speech in front of
Speaker 1: a very different audience. This man's name was Gerald Ratner,
Speaker 1: and he didn't have a dream. He had a nightmare.
Speaker 1: I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to cautionary tales. Gerald
Speaker 1: Ratner's speech, to be clear, wasn't about civil rights. It
Speaker 1: was about selling cheap jewelry. It became iconic because it
Speaker 1: didn't go well. And as you've probably figured out by now,
Speaker 1: I'm fascinated by things that didn't go well. But I'll
Speaker 1: let you into a secret. I'm also fascinated by the
Speaker 1: art of public speaking. I love doing it and i
Speaker 1: love studying it. Public speaking is such a strange thing,
Speaker 1: as natural as talking and yet wrenchingly difficult. And how
Speaker 1: it was approached by these two men, Gerald Ratner and
Speaker 1: Martin Luther King, And what happened to them could teach
Speaker 1: us a lot. Doctor King and mister Ratner are a
Speaker 1: study in contrasts. Martin Luther King took the high road
Speaker 1: through education, earning a doctorate in theology. Gerald Ratner took
Speaker 1: the low road. Ratner was born in London in nineteen
Speaker 1: forty nine and expelled from school at the age of thirteen.
Speaker 1: When he was fifteen, he joined the family business, a
Speaker 1: group of six jewelry shops. Ratna worked behind the counter
Speaker 1: for ten years years but noticed that he didn't have
Speaker 1: many customers his age or younger. Those people had no
Speaker 1: interest in gold and diamond rings. They were spending plenty
Speaker 1: of money on clothes and music. Shopping malls were busy,
Speaker 1: jewelers were not. They were dusty and intimidating. Nothing had
Speaker 1: a price tag for doors would be locked behind you
Speaker 1: when you entered. Young Gerald soon had a management role
Speaker 1: and steered the family business towards more informal shops, selling
Speaker 1: products that would appeal to young shoppers on a budget.
Speaker 1: It was a canny move. By the age of thirty five,
Speaker 1: Ratner was a millionaire. He began a series of ambitious takeovers.
Speaker 1: By the age of forty, he was running fifteen hundred
Speaker 1: stores in the UK and a thousand in the US.
Speaker 1: His brands included k Watches of Switzerland and Ratner's itself.
Speaker 1: Gerald Ratner had built the largest jewelry group on the planet,
Speaker 1: and then he destroyed it in a matter of seconds.
Speaker 1: Gerald Ratner had been asked to address the Institute of Directors,
Speaker 1: a prestigious audience of six thousand British business leaders. The
Speaker 1: venue was the Royal Albert Hall, fast and trimmed with
Speaker 1: gold and red velvet, perhaps the grandest auditorium in London. Understandably,
Speaker 1: Ratner started his speech looking nervous. He was a self
Speaker 1: made man, a school dropout who now stood in front
Speaker 1: of business royalty, and in fact, there were actual royalty
Speaker 1: in the audience too. Ratner was rich and successful, to
Speaker 1: be sure, but did he fit in? Three minutes after
Speaker 1: starting his speech, he finds his theme mocking his own products.
Speaker 1: We've got this imitation book that you lay on your
Speaker 1: coffee table. Pages don't actually open, but they're beautiful, curled
Speaker 1: up corners with imitation antique dust. I know it's you
Speaker 1: might say it's not in the best possible taste, but
Speaker 1: we sold a quarter of a million of them last year.
Speaker 1: The audience love it, They laugh, they clap. Ratner looks braver.
Speaker 1: We also do this nice cherry to cancer. It's cut
Speaker 1: glass and it comes complete with six glasses on a
Speaker 1: silver plated tray that your butler could bring you in
Speaker 1: and serve your drinks on. Oh you're too funny, Gerald.
Speaker 1: Some of the people in the audience would have employed butler's.
Speaker 1: But Ratner's customers certainly couldn't afford one any more than
Speaker 1: they could afford a genuine antique book, a decanter in
Speaker 1: a silver tray for your butler. Nice one, and it's
Speaker 1: really only cost four pounds ninety five pence. That's about
Speaker 1: twelve dollars in today's money. People say to me, how
Speaker 1: can you sell this for such a low price? I say,
Speaker 1: because it's total crests more after more applause. Ratners killing
Speaker 1: it on stage. He's also just killed his own business empire.
Speaker 1: He didn't realize it at the time. The speech had
Speaker 1: gone down very well with the audience in the Royal
Speaker 1: Albert Hall, but the newspaper reporters in the room smelled
Speaker 1: a story. The jokes that had played so brilliantly on
Speaker 1: the day did not go down so well when served
Speaker 1: up cold on the front page of the morning papers.
Speaker 1: At the time, the UK was in the middle of
Speaker 1: a recession. Ordinary people didn't take kindly to a multi
Speaker 1: millionaire standing in front of his fellow one percenters and
Speaker 1: mocking his own customers for their crass taste. And who
Speaker 1: would buy an engagement ring from a company whose own
Speaker 1: boss had declared their products were crap? Say ebbed. Ratner's
Speaker 1: group shares fell nearly ninety percent between the speech in
Speaker 1: April and Christmas. Ratner was sacked from his own company. Inevitably,
Speaker 1: they changed the company name. Ratner's was a toxic brand,
Speaker 1: forever tarnished to this day. In the UK, doing a
Speaker 1: Ratner is part of the language, universally understood as committing
Speaker 1: a humiliating career ending gaff. Ratner's name became its own
Speaker 1: one word cautionary tale. The lesson seems obvious enough if
Speaker 1: everyone's watching, choose your words with care, don't wing it.
Speaker 1: But what if that lesson has the story completely backwards
Speaker 1: In retrospect, the Reverend Doctor King had been preparing his
Speaker 1: whole life to give the speech from the steps of
Speaker 1: the Lincoln Memorial. His memory had always been prodigious. At
Speaker 1: the age of five, he was learning Bible passages by heart.
Speaker 1: He told his parents that when he grew up, he
Speaker 1: was going to get some big words. So he did.
Speaker 1: Martin's father was a preacher, and the boy took to
Speaker 1: the craft of speech making early. At the age of fourteen,
Speaker 1: Martin traveled across Georgia on a bus to compete in
Speaker 1: a public speaking contest. On the way home to Atlanta,
Speaker 1: things went sour, very sour. King and his friend were
Speaker 1: sitting near the front of the bus with their teacher,
Speaker 1: Sarah Grace Bradley. At a busy stop, a rush of
Speaker 1: white passengers got on, and the bus driver, also white,
Speaker 1: ordered King and his friend to give up their seat.
Speaker 1: You boys moving, get yourself to the back of the bus.
Speaker 1: There was a pause. Doctor King later said we didn't
Speaker 1: move quickly enough to suit him, so he began cursing hers.
Speaker 1: The driver was now hurling every racist slur you can
Speaker 1: imagine and threatening to call the police. Martin, please do
Speaker 1: what he says. So we walked to the back of
Speaker 1: the bus and I had to stand all the way
Speaker 1: to Atlanta. It was dark outside for ninety miles. There
Speaker 1: was nothing to look at but the seats on the
Speaker 1: bus filled with white people. It was late at night,
Speaker 1: and I was tired, but that wasn't the point. It
Speaker 1: was the humiliation. Martin, remember, was just fourteen years old.
Speaker 1: That night will never leave my memory. It was the
Speaker 1: angriest I've ever been in my life. Suddenly I realized,
Speaker 1: you don't count. You're nobody. But Martin Luther King Junior
Speaker 1: wasn't destined to be nobody for long. And the journey
Speaker 1: on the way to being not just somebody, but somebody
Speaker 1: who made his mark on history arguably began not with
Speaker 1: that unforgettable humiliation, but with the triumphant day that had
Speaker 1: preceded it. The long and infuriating bus journey of Martin
Speaker 1: Luther King Junior had been on the way home from
Speaker 1: a public speaking competition. Martin had won a prize at
Speaker 1: the contest, delivering his speech titled The Negro and the
Speaker 1: Constitution entirely from memory. My heart throbs anew in the
Speaker 1: hope that, inspired by the example of Lincoln, imbued with
Speaker 1: the spirit of Christ, they will cast down the last
Speaker 1: barrier to a perfect freedom. That speech showed off the
Speaker 1: teenage King's approach. He would research draft redraft, memorize, finally
Speaker 1: deliver with passion. King used the same principles three years later,
Speaker 1: preaching for the first time in a small meeting room
Speaker 1: at his father's church. He was spectacular. The crowds kept
Speaker 1: coming until young Martin had to move to the main auditorium.
Speaker 1: Martin won an oratory prize in college. He used to
Speaker 1: practice imagined court testimony in front of a mirror, dreaming
Speaker 1: of becoming a lawyer. Instead, he applied for a job
Speaker 1: as a minister at a Baptist church in Montgomery, Alabama.
Speaker 1: As part of his application, he had to give a sermon,
Speaker 1: and of course, he used something meticulously crafted, a sermon
Speaker 1: he had preached several times before practice don't just make
Speaker 1: it up as you go along. Once he secured that job,
Speaker 1: he stuck to that winning formula. King's responsibilities as a
Speaker 1: minister had to be fulfilled while he was still finishing
Speaker 1: his doctorate in theology, so he rose at half past
Speaker 1: five each morning, made coffee, shaved his stubborn bristles into
Speaker 1: a neat mustache, then worked on his doctorate for three
Speaker 1: hours before his pregnant wife, Coretta, woke to join him
Speaker 1: for breakfast. All the while King lavished enormous effort on
Speaker 1: his sermons. He would begin drafting on Tuesday and continued
Speaker 1: to research and draft throughout the week, drawing ideas from
Speaker 1: Plato Aquinas Freud Candy. As Sunday approached, he would write
Speaker 1: it all out on yellow lined paper and commit it
Speaker 1: to memory, just as he had done at the age
Speaker 1: of fourteen. He would bring the script to church with him,
Speaker 1: but as he ascended to the pulpit, he would leave
Speaker 1: it in his chair and speak without notes for half
Speaker 1: an hour or more. He was fantastic, people said. The
Speaker 1: congregation adored him and the way he spoke with style
Speaker 1: about matters of substance, and to achieve this mastery, the
Speaker 1: young Reverend King spent fifteen hours or more crafting each sermon.
Speaker 1: Martin Luther King was one of the greatest speechmakers to
Speaker 1: grace the English language, and at first it might seem
Speaker 1: obvious why, as well as being educated and prodigiously talented,
Speaker 1: he ensured that every syllable of his oratory was meticulously prepared.
Speaker 1: Gerald Ratner could have learned from doctor King's example, couldn't he, Well,
Speaker 1: the truth is way more interesting than that, So why
Speaker 1: would a public speaker set aside the script or memorized
Speaker 1: remark and speak off the cuff, I asked Charles Limb.
Speaker 1: He's a neuroscientist, a surgeon, a jazz saxophonist, and one
Speaker 1: of very few people who's actually studied the improvising brain.
Speaker 1: Limb researches people as they improvise inside brain scanners called
Speaker 1: fm our eye machines. Imagine sliding on your back so
Speaker 1: that your head is surrounded by a giant, white plastic
Speaker 1: donut with the feel of a vintage iPod. The scanner
Speaker 1: is generating powerful magnetic fields to illuminate the contrast between
Speaker 1: oxygen rich blood flowing to different areas of your brain
Speaker 1: and the oxygen depleted blood flowing away. Again, your head
Speaker 1: is held perfectly still. If you're a hip hop artist,
Speaker 1: you then have to spit some rhymes in response to
Speaker 1: random words. If you're a jazz musician, you have to
Speaker 1: tap out riffs on a plastic keyboard lying across your
Speaker 1: knee and no metal, Otherwise the magnetic field would rip
Speaker 1: the keyboard apart and pull the shrapnel into the scanner
Speaker 1: with your head. It's a tough gig. Through these experiments,
Speaker 1: Limb and other neuroscientists have been discovering hints of what
Speaker 1: goes on in an improvising brain. There's a distinctive pattern
Speaker 1: in the prefrontal cortex, which seems to be the seat
Speaker 1: of consciousness, memory, morality, humor, and even the sense of self.
Speaker 1: But the pattern isn't that the prefrontal cortex is lighting
Speaker 1: up during improvisation. On the contrary, broad areas of it
Speaker 1: shutting down the dorsolateral areas either side of the top
Speaker 1: of your forehead and the lateral orbital areas behind your eyes.
Speaker 1: Improvisers are escaping their internal restraints. They're letting go. Most
Speaker 1: of us go through our days holding back our mental
Speaker 1: impulses to swear or la shout. All this requires a
Speaker 1: degree of self control, so that filtering is a good thing.
Speaker 1: That you could have too much of a good thing,
Speaker 1: says Charles Limb. Too much filtering can squash our creativity.
Speaker 1: Improvisers shut down their inner critics and allow new ideas
Speaker 1: to flow out. The improvising brain is disinhibited, although not
Speaker 1: so crudely as the drunk brain. That is why improvisers
Speaker 1: can produce flashes of pure brilliance. It's also why improvisation
Speaker 1: feels so risky. A script can seem protective, like a
Speaker 1: bulletproof vest, but sometimes it's more like a strait jacket.
Speaker 1: Improvising unleashes creativity. It feels fresh and honest and personal.
Speaker 1: Above all, it turns a monologue into a dialogue. Miles Davis,
Speaker 1: the legendary jazz trumpeter, talked about improvisation as the freedom
Speaker 1: and space to hear things. That's a fascinating turn of phrase.
Speaker 1: Not the freedom and space to play things or to
Speaker 1: do things, but to hear things, to be more open
Speaker 1: to the sound of your own instrument, the sound of
Speaker 1: the group, And that matters for more than just music
Speaker 1: or rhetoric, because we're scared of improvising, and we're not
Speaker 1: just afraid to improvise on stage, we're also becoming afraid
Speaker 1: to improvise face to face. The sociologist Sherry Turkle has
Speaker 1: been interviewing young people about their communications through smartphone apps.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just because the apps were convenient or addictive,
Speaker 1: although they could be both. Texting is attractive because traditional
Speaker 1: conversations feel scary. I'll tell you what's wrong with conversation.
Speaker 1: One high school senior told Sherry Turkle it takes place
Speaker 1: in real time, and you can't control what you're going
Speaker 1: to say to see. This student is so used to
Speaker 1: being able to proof freed every message that he's become
Speaker 1: scared of simply talking and seeing what happens. But then
Speaker 1: perhaps he's right to be scared. We should ask Gerald Ratner.
Speaker 1: Gerald Ratna learned to laugh at himself a long time ago,
Speaker 1: but he rejects the idea that somehow his mistake all
Speaker 1: worked out for the best. People ask me if I'm
Speaker 1: glad I said what I said? They're ridiculous. How could
Speaker 1: I be grateful? I lost everything? Ratna plunged into depression.
Speaker 1: He has bounced back in some ways. He had some success,
Speaker 1: setting up a chain of health clubs and even an
Speaker 1: online jewelry business. But the truth is that there was
Speaker 1: nothing he could do, no success that he could achieve
Speaker 1: that would ever be as famous as his gaff. The
Speaker 1: for a good joke destroyed his business, and it nearly
Speaker 1: destroyed him. Who would want to risk the fate of
Speaker 1: Gerald Ratner when they could follow the meticulous example of
Speaker 1: the young Martin Luther King. It seems obvious that when
Speaker 1: speaking in public, we should prepare as diligently, as King
Speaker 1: did when he drafted and memorized his sermons. But the
Speaker 1: truth about Gerald Ratner's impromptu remark about his products being
Speaker 1: total crap is this. It wasn't impromptu. He chose those
Speaker 1: words with care after circulating drafts of the speech to
Speaker 1: get comments. He'd used the total crap joke before without
Speaker 1: running into problems, and as he prepared to deliver the
Speaker 1: speech on a larger stage, he sought advice. His wife
Speaker 1: told him to be careful, but others, including a friend
Speaker 1: who was one of the most influential figures in the
Speaker 1: advertising industry, encouraged him to tell even more daring jokes.
Speaker 1: They thought Ratna would sound self deprecating and that his
Speaker 1: audience would love the gags, which was true. Those in
Speaker 1: the hall that day did love it. But in the
Speaker 1: newspapers the next morning, Ratner simply sounded like a millionaire
Speaker 1: mocking his struggling customers. When I listened back to Ratner's speech,
Speaker 1: I don't hear the mockery at all. I hear something else.
Speaker 1: Immediately after saying his own products were crap, Ratner says
Speaker 1: our Ratner's shots will never win any awards for design
Speaker 1: they're not in the best possible taste. I admit that.
Speaker 1: In fact, some people say they can't even see the
Speaker 1: jewelry for all the banners and posters smothering the shot windows.
Speaker 1: There's a different tone. Suddenly, there's a note of defiance,
Speaker 1: even anger. So it's interesting that these shots that everyone
Speaker 1: has a good laugh about take more money per square
Speaker 1: foot than any other retailer in Europe. The hall is hush, now,
Speaker 1: nobody's laughing. Why, because we give the customer what they want.
Speaker 1: Gerald Ratner wasn't laughing at his customers. He identified with them.
Speaker 1: He thought the business royalty in the hall were laughing
Speaker 1: at his customers and his business ideas and him. This
Speaker 1: was his response, You laugh at us, he was saying,
Speaker 1: but my customers are happy and I'm rich, So who's
Speaker 1: laughing now. Ratner's downfall wasn't caused by a lack of preparation,
Speaker 1: but by a lack of judgment. Ratna did exactly what
Speaker 1: he planned to do. He had simply failed to foresee
Speaker 1: the consequences. Improvisation was not to blame. Improvising does expose
Speaker 1: us to new and different risks, but even careful preparation
Speaker 1: cannot remove Risks entirely. In December nineteen fifty five, Rosa
Speaker 1: Parks was arrested after refusing to give up her seat
Speaker 1: on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama to a white man.
Speaker 1: As a local church leader with a reputation as an orator,
Speaker 1: Martin Luther King was asked to organize a boycott of
Speaker 1: Montgomery's buses. He hesitated. He was exhausted. His newborn baby daughter, Joki,
Speaker 1: wouldn't stop crying in the night. King asked for time
Speaker 1: to mull over the idea of a bus boycott, but
Speaker 1: an influential local activist ed Nixon would have no delays.
Speaker 1: You ain't got much time to think, said Nixon. You're
Speaker 1: in the chair from now on. So it was that
Speaker 1: King found himself bounced into leading the Montgomery Improvement Association.
Speaker 1: He had to give an inaugural speech, and he had
Speaker 1: to give it immediately. Rosa Parks was news, the bus
Speaker 1: boycott was news. There wasn't time to spend days redrafting
Speaker 1: or consulting the sayings of Plato or Gandy. Doctor King
Speaker 1: arrived home from the meeting with Edy, Nixon and the
Speaker 1: activists at half past six. He had to head to
Speaker 1: the speech venue Holt Street Church at ten to seven.
Speaker 1: I had only twenty minutes to prepare the most decisive
Speaker 1: speech of my life. I became possessed by fear. King
Speaker 1: knew that newspaper men would be there, perhaps even television crews.
Speaker 1: And yet just as the stakes were highest, the habit
Speaker 1: of meticulous preparation that had served him so well all
Speaker 1: his life was useless. He couldn't research, draft, redraft, and memorized.
Speaker 1: He had no time. King looked at his watch. Already
Speaker 1: five minutes had ticked away while he fretted. Every Sunday
Speaker 1: he delivered a sermon based on fifteen hours of hard work.
Speaker 1: Now he was about to deliver the most important speech
Speaker 1: of his life, and he had just fifteen minutes. He
Speaker 1: sketched a couple of thoughts with his hand shaking, pondering
Speaker 1: the delicate balance he had to strike between militancy and moderation,
Speaker 1: and he prayed that was all the preparation he could
Speaker 1: spare before driving to the Holt Street Church. Ten thousand
Speaker 1: people stood outside, unable to cram themselves in, listening to
Speaker 1: the proceedings via a loud speaker on the roof. For
Speaker 1: Montgomery police were therein force, so were the television cameras
Speaker 1: pointing at the pulpit as King stepped up and began
Speaker 1: to speak. My friends were here this evening for serious business.
Speaker 1: The speech is brilliantly described in Taylor Branch, his biography
Speaker 1: of King. Instead of the usual careful script, lovingly prepared
Speaker 1: and committed to memory, King was groping his way towards
Speaker 1: the right words. I think I speak with legal authority,
Speaker 1: not that I have any legal authority, but I think
Speaker 1: I speak with legal authority behind me. That the law,
Speaker 1: the ordinance, the city ordinance, has never been totally clarified.
Speaker 1: He had never in his life delivered a sermon with
Speaker 1: a line as weak and confused as that one. Fifteen
Speaker 1: hours of preparation always ironed out every wrinkle. But King
Speaker 1: was finding something more valuable than time to prepare. In
Speaker 1: Miles Davis's phrase, the freedom and space to hear things.
Speaker 1: As he spoke, King listened to the crowd, feeling out
Speaker 1: their response. Speaking in the moment. His early sentences were
Speaker 1: experiments grasping for a theme, exploring how each sounded and
Speaker 1: how the crowd responded. Each phrase shaped. The phrase that
Speaker 1: followed his speech was not a solo. It was a
Speaker 1: duet with his audience. After a cautious opening, King talked
Speaker 1: of Rosa Parks, of her character and Christian commitment, and
Speaker 1: just because she refused to get up, she was arrested.
Speaker 1: The crowd murmured their assent. After a pause for breath,
Speaker 1: King changed direction. You know, my friends, there comes a
Speaker 1: time when people get tired of being trampled over by
Speaker 1: the iron feet of a pressure. And suddenly the avalanche began.
Speaker 1: A few yells of support became a roar of approval
Speaker 1: and anger. The spirit of the crowd was self sustaining,
Speaker 1: a torrent of emotion and sound, which grew stronger. Just
Speaker 1: when it seemed the sound must fade further, waves crashed
Speaker 1: in from the thousands of voices outside. The cheering was everywhere.
Speaker 1: Then King spoke up again. With the help of the crowd,
Speaker 1: he found his theme. There comes a time when people
Speaker 1: get tired of getting pushed out of the glittering sunlight
Speaker 1: of life's jula and left standing amidst the piercing chill
Speaker 1: of an Alpine November, amid the sound of feet thundering
Speaker 1: on the church's wooden floorboards, King was forced to pause.
Speaker 1: As with any extemporaneous performance, Kings was imperfect, with some
Speaker 1: meandering lines and a limp conclusion. Despite all that, these
Speaker 1: improvised remarks were easily the finest speech that King had
Speaker 1: yet given. People who had seen him speak many times
Speaker 1: were astonished. He spoke with so much force. Nobody, said
Speaker 1: one witness, nobody dreamed of marks In Luther King being
Speaker 1: that sort of man under these conditions. King himself, one suspects,
Speaker 1: had not truly understood what he could unleash once he
Speaker 1: let himself go. He didn't want to improvise the speech,
Speaker 1: preferred the script for when the situation gave him no alternative.
Speaker 1: He came to understand what older preachers had told him,
Speaker 1: open your mouth and God will speak for you. Seven
Speaker 1: and a half years later, in nineteen sixty three, he
Speaker 1: found himself faced with speaking to a quarter of a
Speaker 1: million people who'd marched on Washington d C. He knew
Speaker 1: he'd be live on every national television network. This speech
Speaker 1: demanded the preparation of old It was too important to
Speaker 1: be left to chance. Doctor King and his aids had
Speaker 1: prepared a typewritten script, unpromisingly titled Normals Never Again. King's
Speaker 1: team was trying to navigate complex waters with the text
Speaker 1: of this address. King needed to reach out to white allies,
Speaker 1: to rebut the hardline approach of Malcolm X and others,
Speaker 1: and to respond to President Kennedy's Civil Rights Bill. Was
Speaker 1: the bill to be criticized as inadequate or welcomed as progress.
Speaker 1: There was much politicking behind the scenes, and each speaker
Speaker 1: had been allotted only seven minutes. There was no exception
Speaker 1: for Martin Luther King. All of these constraints called for
Speaker 1: precise drafting. He knew that he would be speaking with
Speaker 1: a vast statue of Abraham Lincoln behind him, a hundred
Speaker 1: years after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation had declared the enslaved people
Speaker 1: of the United States to be free. So King decided
Speaker 1: to open with an artful echo of Lincoln's Great Gettysburg
Speaker 1: Address and referred to the Emancipation Proclamation as a promissory
Speaker 1: note on which America had defaulted. As a script normal
Speaker 1: syne never again was over formal and flawed. Parts of
Speaker 1: it read like poetry. Others were clumsy legal ease. As
Speaker 1: King read out the speech, it did not stir the soul,
Speaker 1: but then toward the end came a biblical flourish. And
Speaker 1: we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters,
Speaker 1: and righteousness like a mighty stream. And as King said
Speaker 1: those words, approving cheers rippled up and down them all.
Speaker 1: Then King looked down at his script. The next line
Speaker 1: was pretentious and limp. He couldn't bring himself to say
Speaker 1: the words, and so instead he started to improvise, telling
Speaker 1: the crowd go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama.
Speaker 1: Behind him stood his friends and colleagues. They knew that
Speaker 1: King had stepped away from the script, and at the
Speaker 1: moment of maximum danger and maximum opportunity, the climax of
Speaker 1: his speech, he was looking for something to say, something
Speaker 1: that would touch the people there at the mall and
Speaker 1: watching across the country. Hellaa that the dream lying, yelled
Speaker 1: the singer Mahalia Jackson. It was a reference to something
Speaker 1: doctor King had been preaching of late to church congregations,
Speaker 1: a dream of a brighter future in which whites and
Speaker 1: blacks lived in harmony. And as he stood, facing the
Speaker 1: television cameras and the vast expectant crowd looking for inspiration,
Speaker 1: Martin Luther King heard Mahalia Jackson, and he began to
Speaker 1: create on the fly, one of the most famous speeches
Speaker 1: of the century about how he had a dream, a
Speaker 1: dream that America would live up to the words all
Speaker 1: Men are Created Equal, A dream of an oasis of
Speaker 1: freedom and justice. A dream that little black boys and
Speaker 1: black girls would be able to join hands with little
Speaker 1: white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. Normalcy
Speaker 1: never again was forgotten. The conclusion to the speech that
Speaker 1: shook the twentieth century wasn't in the script. The best
Speaker 1: things usually aren't. Key sources for this episode include Taylor
Speaker 1: Branch's book Parting the Waters, Martin Luther King Junior's autobiography,
Speaker 1: and my own book MESSI The Power of Disorder to
Speaker 1: Transform Our Lives. For a full list of references, see
Speaker 1: Tim Harford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me
Speaker 1: Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan Dilley
Speaker 1: and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music is
Speaker 1: the work of Pascal Wise. Julia Bartin edited the scripts.
Speaker 1: Starring in this series of Cautionary Tales Helena Bonham Carter,
Speaker 1: and Jeffrey Wright, alongside Nazzar Elderazzi, Ed Gochen, Melanie Gutterridge,
Speaker 1: Rachel Hanshaw, copenaholbrook Smith, Greg Lockett, Miss Siamunroe and Rufus Wright.
Speaker 1: This show wouldn't have been possible without the work of
Speaker 1: mil LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, John Schnarz, Carlie mcgliory,
Speaker 1: Eric Sandler, Emily Rostick, Maggie Taylor and Yellow Lakhan and
Speaker 1: Maya Kanig. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.
Speaker 1: If you like the show, please remember rate, share, and
Speaker 1: review