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It’s because he’s not reading he’s riffing, like a jazz musician. King rarely looks down in the second half of the speech. Now watch the video again, beginning at 12 minutes, 30 seconds. It’s an example of rhetorical dexterity at its finest. His mesmerizing words and sentence structure were truly delivered extemporaneously. Remarkably, if you read the text of the Detroit event, you’ll see that he did not recite the same sentences word for word. In fact King delivered the now familiar refrain, or at least a version of it, two months earlier at Cobo Hall in Detroit. Improvise means “to deliver without prior preparation.” It does not mean that King completely made up the words on the spot. King improvised much of the second half of the speech, including the “I have a dream” refrain.

He shifted gears in a heartbeat, abandoning whatever final version he’d prepared…he’d given himself over to the spirit of the moment.” Jones leaned over to the person standing next to him and said, “These people out there today don’t know it yet, but they’re about to go to church.” Jones saw King “push the text of his prepared remarks to one side of the lectern. In that brief silence, Mahalia Jackson, a gospel singer and good friend of King’s, shouted “tell ‘em about the ‘dream.’” Few people heard her, with the exception of Jones, Ted Kennedy, and, of course, King. In the seventh paragraph, something extraordinary happened. “A pleasant shock came over me as I realized that he seemed to be essentially reciting those suggested opening paragraphs I had scrawled down the night before in my hotel room,” wrote Jones. King looks down because he is reading the text. If you watch the video, you’ll notice that King is looking down a lot in the first part of the speech (watch King read at 2 minutes, 10 seconds into the video clip). Fast forward a few hours later when King was delivering the speech. The next morning King’s speech was finished and copies were delivered to the press. It was not easy voices from every compass point were ringing in my head,” wrote Jones. “I tried to summarize the various points made by all of his supporters.

Everyone in the room represented a group that had a stake in the speech and who wanted their voices to be heard.

King asked Jones to take notes and to turn the notes into cohesive remarks he would deliver on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. A group of seven individuals, including Jones, had gathered with King at the Willard Hotel to add their input to the final speech. The story begins the night before the speech, Tuesday, August 27, 1963.