Martin Luther King Jr's "I Have A Dream" Full Speech Restored

"I Have a Dream" is a public speech that was delivered by American civil rights activist and Baptist minister Martin Luther King Jr. during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. In the speech, King called for civil and economic rights and an end to racism in the United States. Delivered to over 250,000 civil rights supporters from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., the speech was a defining moment of the civil rights movement and among the most iconic speeches in American history.

The full "I Have A Dream" speech is infamous for only being available in low quality for a long time, with the only source online being a 240p VHS rip that has been circulating for more than 15 years. This is due to the King family's strict control over the use of the speech and video/film footage of it. Due to this the full speech has rarely ever been rebroadcast.

However on August 26th 2021 Epic Games made the odd decision to include the speech in their video game Fortnite during the event "Celebrate MLK: TIME Studios Presents March Through Time" This event, though meant to be educational, is infamous for being very out of place in the cartoonish shooter. However during this event a large screen portrayed the full, unedited speech.

The copy that was shown was much higher quality than the common version due to it being straight from the archives of either TIME or the King Family. It appears to be sourced from a kinescope of a direct feed, rather than the TV broadcast that the common version was sourced from.

I remembered that this happened a few months ago and found out that the copy in the Fortnite event was much higher quality so I set out to create the highest publicly available copy of the full speech.

The main source is from a youtube video I can no longer seem to find, apparently at one point it was possible to have the feed show up directly in the corner of the screen. This provides a high quality direct version of the footage. However the only recording that I could find showing this was missing a few bits due to the person recording exploring the event map and occasionally pausing or due to frame drops. To patch in these bits I recorded the big screen in the center of the map myself, however due to map geometry covering a bit of the screen these bits had to be cropped a bit.

The audio is a mix of what I like to call the "Vinyl" copy (the version commonly distributed via vinyl and cd releases) and the "broadcast copy" which is commonly distributed through the common video. I had to replace the audio as the Fortnite version had a generic dramatic music track over the audio. The Vinyl copy has an issue where it seems the mic cut out for part of the speech, and they had to use a recording from farther away instead. I have replaced this part with the broadcast copy which is why you might notice a decrease in quality.

The other main source is the film "The March". This documentary contains a shortened version of the speech shot on 35mm film, which allows for an HD image. However this source was only used for part of the speech due to it's incompleteness and due to it's far away angle at times.

I allow for this restoration to be used in any way. However due note that the footage and speech is still under copyright of their respective owners.

Видео Martin Luther King Jr's "I Have A Dream" Full Speech Restored канала Notelu