The unknown hero of MLK’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech

When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. stepped to the podium at the Lincoln Memorial on a stifling hot August day in 1963, he faced a cast of characters who also knew how to command a stage.

At the White House, President John F. Kennedy watched King deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech on live television while declaring, “He’s damned good!” Sitting onstage to King’s left, Mahalia Jackson inspired the speech’s improvised closing by shouting, “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” And such celebrities as Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston and Lena Horne joined 250,000 people in the audience as King barreled to the climax of his most famous speech.

Most now know what happened next. King’s address at the March on Washington is now seen by many as the greatest political speech in American history. Even Kennedy, who had initially opposed the march, was beaming when he greeted the civil rights leader at a White House reception afterward, telling King with a smile, “And you had a dream.”

President John F. Kennedy meets with King, center left, and a group of other leaders of the March on Washington at the White House after King's speech on August 28, 1963. AP

But King wasn’t the first one to have that dream. He wasn’t the first to enthrall America with a vision of a new, harmonious social order where race, class or creed didn’t divide people. And he wasn’t the first American to have his dream go viral.

That honor belonged to a White, bespectacled Wall Street banker named James Truslow Adams, whose name rarely surfaces when King’s greatest speech is cited. Adams is the forgotten hero of King’s greatest speech. He’s the “the founding father” of the dream metaphor that became the central image of the civil rights movement.

Three decades before King’s speech, Adams coined and popularized the idea of the American dream in his bestselling book, “The Epic of America,” written to rally Americans during the depths of the Great Depression.

A 1938 photograph of James Truslow Adams. Boston Herald-Traveler Photo Morgue/Boston Public Library

“There were scattered references to an American dream around 1870, but it was Adams who put the phrase on the map,” Jim Cullen, author of “The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation,” tells CNN.