"I HAVE A DREAM SPEECH" Republican in Origin?

Portions of many of King's speeches were borrowed from other preachers, both fellow African Americans and white radio evangelists. Perhaps most notably, the closing passage from King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech was borrowed from Archibald Carey, Jr.'s address to the 1952 Republican National Convention. The major similarity is that both speeches end with a recitation of the first verse of Samuel Francis Smith's popular patriotic hymn "America" (My Country ’Tis of Thee), and the names of some mountains mentioned from each exhorts "let freedom ring" are the same in both speeches. Keith Miller, in Voice of Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Its Sources, argues that such borrowing, which he terms "voice merging", follows in a long tradition of folk preaching, particularly in the African American church, and should not necessarily be termed plagiarism. On the contrary, he views King's skillful combination of language from different sources as a major oratorical skill.