Controversies over the boundaries of permissible speech on college campuses, over universities’ use of racial and ethnic classifications in admissions decisions, over numerous states’ enactment of stricter voter-registration laws, and above all over the deaths of various African Americans in encounters with police officers and the consequent emergence of the “Black Lives Matter” protest movement-all of these reveal deep divisions regarding the nature and grounds of rights, the requisites for the rule of law, the proper mode of racial integration, and even the grounds of allegiance to or identification with America. Our contemporary divisions over race once again touch upon America’s first principles. Although we are not presently “engaged in a great civil war,” our nation is sharply divided over race-perhaps more sharply and dangerously than at any other point in the post-1960s, post-King, post-Civil Rights era. Amid the nation’s greatest peril, he raised the worrisome question whether nations, too, including this seemingly exceptional republic, have a natural lifespan. Via the language of “four score and seven,” Lincoln at Gettysburg reminded his listeners of a biblical reflection on human mortality (see Psalm 90:10). The date prompts more troubling reflections on the relation of King to Lincoln and on our present circumstances. This January, we observe the eighty-seventh anniversary-the four-score-and-seven-years’ anniversary-of King’s birth. So it comes that each January Americans commemorate the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., as a national holiday.
The Great Integrator has joined the Great Emancipator in the pantheon of immortal heroes of the American Republic. King’s Dream speech is commonly regarded as the greatest American speech of the twentieth century, and King himself has been apotheosized in the decades following his death. His dream, he said, was a dream “deeply rooted in the American Dream.” “We stand” in Abraham Lincoln’s “symbolic shadow,” King observed, as he spoke on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in the hundredth anniversary year of the Emancipation Proclamation. The second American revolution figured still more prominently. In the Dream speech, he extolled “the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,” which set forth the original revolution’s promise to secure to all Americans the natural, unalienable rights with which humankind is endowed by their Creator. I have a dream today!Īs he explained in his book Why We Can’t Wait, published later that same year, King saw the Civil Rights Movement as “America’s third revolution,” continuing and heralding the completion of the first two.
FOUR SCORE AND SEVEN YEARS AGO SKIN
I have a dream my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I say to you, my friends, that even though we must face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream…. On August 28, 1963, in the most famous moment of the greatest mass-protest demonstration in US history, Martin Luther King, Jr., declared:
0 kommentar(er)
