King's Speech ... part four

Source: Library of Congress

This is the final installation of this particular post. As in the first three posts, my charges were given the I Have a Dream speech after a week of discussion of the Modern Civil Rights Era: from "40 acres and a mule" to Montgomery Bus Boycott to the Black Panthers.



This is the spot where Dr. King gave his speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
(Source: National Park Service)


The first step was to identify key words in the speech. They then compiled a list as a team each hour and I identified words used by two or more of the different classes. The words for this cutting were:

• Liberty
• Freedom

Step two was to summarize the text using King's words. Step three was to put the text into their own words, using Twitter, Haiku or a 20 word note card. Here are what the teams came up with:

Tweet
2day every man (imagine a emoticon for man) is = in #freedom #liberty >>da #nation. #Free@Last. No matter (people emoticon) everybody (woman emoticon). #AMEN

Tweet
1 day all peeps will be (hand emoticon) 'n (hand emoticon) & sing "My Country Tis of Thee." Freedom will b n all (city emoticon) & states. #Free@Last.

Haiku
People, think diff'rent
Independence has arrived
Now, there's liberty

The final cutting of the speech:
This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring." And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania! Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado! Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California! But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia! Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee! Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring. And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"