I Have a Dream by Martin Luther King Jr. (1963)

It begins as cold arithmetic. America, King says, has handed its Black citizens a promissory note, and the check has come back marked insufficient funds. Then, partway through, the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson calls out from behind him, "Tell them about the dream, Martin," and he pushes the prepared text aside and lets the cadence take him. What follows is not argument but incantation: the same words returning and rising, Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia named first as the geography of injury and then, line by line, as the geography of freedom, every hilltop and molehill set ringing. You can hear the distance between the promise and the withholding narrow with each repetition until it becomes unbearable that the gap exists at all. This is a prophecy aimed straight at the founding documents, demanding not that America be remade but that it finally keep its word.