A Dream Come True
Distinguished Professor of English Jason Miller screens his film, Origin of the Dream.
In 2013, Distinguished Professor of English Jason Miller discovered an audio reel with a hidden history. Long forgotten in a Rocky Mount, N.C., library was a recording of a November 1962 speech Martin Luther King Jr. delivered at Rocky Mount’s Booker T. Washington High School.
But it wasn’t just any speech: It was the first time King delivered a version of his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech — the speech he would famously deliver nine months later at the March on Washington, D.C. And the reel Miller found is the only known recording of the precursor to that seminal moment in civil rights history.
Miller has captured the story of his discovery in a new documentary, Origin of the Dream. Co-produced with journalist Cash Michaels and filmmakers Rebecca Cerese and Neal Hutcheson ’92, an NC State senior research scholar in the Department of English, the film follows King’s visit to Rocky Mount and connects King’s rhetoric to the work of Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes.
Miller screened the film in January at an NC State University Libraries event at the James B. Hunt Jr. Library.
Everett Ward ’03 MA, a former president of Saint Augustine’s University and lead consultant on the film, was in attendance and praised the power of Miller’s find and the subsequent documentary’s impact of showing what can continue to be unearthed. “We have to celebrate and affirm everyone’s history. All of it has value and has to be documented,” Ward said. “I’m excited about the other history and the history yet to be found.”
Miller says that the film will be shown on PBS North Carolina this fall, while being available nationally on pbs.org this summer. Miller says the film is representative of the bold research visions fostered by the university.
“We don’t raise tents [at NC State],” Miller said at the premiere. “We build pyramids.”
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