Scott Simon talks with Michael Eric Dyson, a professor of sociology at Georgetown University, who wrote the essay in the book — as well as Freed's wife, Brigitte, who was also there on that hot summer morning:
"It was a self-assigned story," she recalls. "Nobody asked him to do this story."
Although most Americans were hearing King's words for the first time, he had actually delivered some of the same phrases in a Detroit speech a couple of months before.
"That having been said, it doesn't mean that his charisma wasn't extraordinary," says Dyson. "King ... stood at the sunlit summit of expectation and articulated a dream as golden and as powerful ... now as it was then — and Leonard Freed captures those people who King felt were worth fighting for."
