(HOST) As we prepare to hear Senator Barack Obama accept the Democratic nomination for President this Thursday evening – teacher, historian, and commentator Vic Henningsen thinks it’s interesting to note that Thursday will also mark the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s "I Have a Dream" speech – highlight of the 1963 March on Washington.
(HENNINGSEN) Dr. King’s "I Have A Dream" speech may be read on many levels. It’s a majestic call to arms, to be sure, and it’s certainly one of the greatest sermons ever delivered. It’s also a meditation on American history – a reflection on the great promise that is America; a promise as yet unfulfilled.
King’s "dream", of course, was racial equality, a distant vision in 1963. Despite Supreme Court action barring segregation; despite the successes of the civil rights movement in the South, America remained a nation divided by race. As thousands followed King to Washington, a civil rights act, only grudgingly proposed by the Kennedy administration, was bogged down in Congress with little hope of passage. The degradation of the "Jim Crow" system of racial separation remained a fact of life in the U.S. By law in the South, by custom and economics in the North, African-Americans remained separate and unequal.
Putting his case to a skeptical nation, King tied together three seminal American documents and gave them renewed meaning .
The first was the Declaration of Independence, which asserted as a self-evident truth that "all men are created equal". This, King called America’s "creed". His dream was that the nation would "rise up and live out the true meaning" of that belief.
The second was Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg Address, itself a meditation on fulfilling the promise of the Declaration of Independence. The Civil War, was re-creating the country, something Lincoln made clear by consciously abandoning the word "Union" in describing the U.S. and referring to it as a "nation" throughout. That has more than simply semantic significance: from a union – a collection of separate entities – America was becoming a nation – unitary, indivisible. The war required emancipation, a dramatic act that changed the nature of the country and renewed the promise of the Declaration’s fundamental ideal of equality.
The third was the hymn "America". King foresaw the day that "all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning, ‘My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing."
To African-American listeners in particular, King’s recital of "America" in front of the Lincoln Memorial had special relevance. In 1939, singer Marian Anderson had been denied the use of Constitution Hall, the largest auditorium in Washington, because of her race. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt arranged a public concert at the Lincoln Memorial which Anderson began with "America". Poignantly, she sang not "of thee I sing", but "to thee I sing" – acknowledging that Americans like her weren’t included. Now, almost twenty-five years later, with Marian Anderson in the audience, King envisioned an America all could celebrate.
It’s one of the most important speeches ever given, made so not simply by the power of King’s oratory, but by his ability to weave together other central American documents and give them new meaning while, once again, summoning all of us to "a new birth of freedom."