How the Poetry of Langston Hughes Inspired Martin Luther King’s First Dream
- Oct 20, 2025
- 1 min read
By UF Press
Martin Luther King, Jr. first spoke of “dreams” in a sermon he delivered on April 5, 1959. His subject that day was disappointment, not hope. The focus of his sermon came when he said: “Very few people are privileged to live life with all of their dreams realized and all of their hopes fulfilled. Who here this morning has not had to face the agony of blasted hopes and shattered dreams?” Though it doesn’t flash on first glance, King’s reference to unfulfilled and shattered dreams is actually an allusion to Langston Hughes’s famous poem “Dream Deferred” (first titled “Harlem” in 1951). This sermon became one of King’s most repeated and personal sermons, and on other occasions King made the connections to Hughes’s poem explicit: “I am personally the victim of deferred dreams, of blasted hopes.”
