On Jan. 22 in Witherspoon Student Center, the African American Cultural Center hosted the event “Dr. King’s First Dream: Lunch and Learn with Jason Miller.” Miller, a professor of English at NC State, researches the effects of Poet Langston Hughes’ art on Martin Luther King  Jr. Miller’s research is also part of a current project with the Southern Documentary Fund on the same subject.

Miller spoke about the topic of the event in the context of his research.

“The idea is to really share the discovery and background to understanding that King gave his first ever ‘I Had a Dream Speech’ right here in Rocky Mount, North Carolina nine months before the March on Washington,” Miller said. “It’s an informative way to hear that speech that’s been digitized and restored and understand a lot of the context surrounding it, including the poetry of Langston Hughes, which greatly inspired King.”

Hughes was one of the most influential American poets during the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. Miller’s talk focused on the often subtle ways Hughes’ work shaped King’s rhetoric.

“Dr. King did not just quote Langston Hughes line for line,” Miller said. “When Dr. King used Langston Hughes’ poems he hardly ever quoted them word for word. He most often rifted on them, signified on them, alluded to them or, if we’re in the right generation, he sampled them.”

Throughout his political career, King incorporated many of Hughes’ poems into his speeches. Three of Hughes’ poems, “I Dream a World,” “Dream Deferred” and the unpublished “Poem for a Man,” would ultimately come to influence King’s most famous speech.

On Nov. 27, 1962, King gave his first dream inspired speech in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. According to Miller, this meant King spoke about his dream to North Carolina nine months before the March on Washington.

“The implications of Dr. King speaking in Rocky Mount have three really big, important factors for us,” Miller said. “It means that Langston Hughes’ poetry was as important to the civil rights movement as it was to the Harlem Renaissance. … For Dr. King, we have long recognized his dream has its roots in the American Dream. … We have long recognized the prophetic tradition of his work. That doesn’t happen until the very end when he starts dreaming, but the roots of his dream come from three Langston Hughes poems.”

Miller emphasized one other factor in his speech.

“So Dr. King’s mind found a way to coalesce and bring all three threads together,” Miller said. “For North Carolina, we often forget that North Carolina was at the forefront of the civil rights movement.”

Sachelle M. Ford, the assistant director of the African American Cultural Center, attended the event.

“I was so incredibly moved by Dr. Jason’s presentation and the research that he’s done really helping us to better understand the legacy of both Hughes and King,” Ford said. “And how important art, specifically literature, was to the civil rights movement because we don’t tend to think about that. We tend to think about maybe poetry and art of black power, but not yet in civil rights…But it really adds another dimension into really understanding how skillful he was with language.”

Toni Thorpe, the retired program coordinator  for the African American Cultural Center, commented on the presentation.

“It’s the importance of acknowledging how the arts bring life to the human experience and that’s what this scholarship is about,” Thorpe said. “The arts is scholarship. It is life told with rhythm and experience that gives respect to the fact to that the out of the classroom education empowers the education in the classroom. So to have Dr. Miller in his brilliance show that through scholarship is phenomenal.”

Miller spoke about one important takeaway from the event for the students of NC State.

“North Carolina was really at the forefront of the civil rights movement of the 1960’s and Dr. King was a big part of that,” Miller said. “What I’m always shocked about is telling students, and they never realize this, that Dr. King actually spoke right here on campus in 1966. And so the background of those connections, these huge historic figures, they seem distant and far away, but Dr. King was very, very close to us.”

More information about Miller’s research and King’s first dream can be found on their website.