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described his dream of a United States that a century later finally fulfilled the promise of President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. “Almost singing the words in his soaring baritone, Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. “On 28th August 1963, a quarter of a million demonstrators, black and white, converged on the capital of the United States to participate in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
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“That those tensions could exist simultaneously is the real message behind King’s speech and where the civil rights movement stood in 1963.”īenjamin Houston is a lecturer in 20th century US history at Newcastle University “King’s speech resonated not only throughout the United States but across the world” “Yet he never lost some element of hope, despite all the reasons for pessimism, that America might yet fulfill its fullest promise. “It foreshadowed King’s deepening critique of the wider structures of America that would dominate his thought and the social and political conflicts of the 1960s. “Even his soaring oratory at the March on Washington spoke of cashing a cheque, of laying claim to the economic aspirations that remained largely out of reach to African Americans. “What this anniversary and the canonization of King’s speech should not obscure is the import of that new message as harkening King’s later evolution as a political radical. “He meant to give ‘new meaning’, as he said in the speech, to old words and clichés that nonetheless were rooted in broader notions of the American Dream. “The speech crystallises some of King’s greatest gifts, not the least of which an ability to address diverse constituencies with one voice – to both revive the souls of the march participants and to stir the consciences of the greater public beyond, to speak eloquently to the African American experience and yet also the wider American spirit simultaneously. It certainly should be classed as among a handful of epochal speeches in US history, perhaps second only to the Gettysburg Address. “Calling King’s address ‘the greatest in history’ is a tall order, for any historian to judge and any speech to live up to.