Today we celebrate the birthday of one of the most influential men in American history. The son of a reverend born in Atlanta, Georgia, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began the campaign for civil rights in 1953 by helping to organize the Montgomery Bus Boycott. He later brought his nonviolent campaign against segregation to Bull Connor's Birmingham in 1963. The trip landed King in jail on Good Friday, where he composed "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," a truly remarkable document explaining the religious and philosophical underpinnings of nonviolent civil disobedience.
Change didn't come easily. Bombings at homes and churches, police brutality, and murder at the hands of white supremacists continued. However, a month after the Birmingham protest, President John Kennedy sent a civil-rights bill to Congress, prompting a sea of marchers to descent on Washington to build support for the bill's passage in August 1963. The marchers assembled at the Lincoln Memorial and listened to performances by Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Odetta and Mahilia Jackson. Veteran activist A. Philip Randolph urged the passage of the civil-rights bill. Then, the master orator King took the podium: "Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. . . . Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. . . . We are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like the waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream." He concluded, in his now-famous lines:
I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four 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 have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor's lips are presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.
...
When we let freedom ring, whem 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!"
(First posted on Martin Luther King Day 2007.)
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