LAD #26: I Have a Dream

             Perhaps the most well known activist of the Civil Rights Era, Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his powerful "I Have a Dream Speech" during the march on Washington. As Lincoln sits solemnly in his memorial, Dr. King begins by speaking of the accomplishment of the man who led us through the Civil War. "Four score and five years ago" President Lincoln passed the Emancipation Proclamation, and yet a hundred years later African Americans still are not free as they live in poverty and segregation and is still "languished in the corner of society." Referring back to our Founding Fathers, Dr. King declares that our government has defaulted on the promise they set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as still today African Americans are denied their unalienable rights. Despite this King believes that the "Bank of justice" still can give them what they deserve as they come to cash their "check." Now is the time to stop taking the "tranquilizing drug of gradualism," but the time to "make real the promises of democracy." In mesmerizing rhetoric, Dr. King emphasizes that it is now the time for African Americans to finally become equals. If the nation returns to "business as usual" it will be shocked as African Americans are granted their full rights. Despite this promise, he also emphasizes that their protests shall not "degenerate into physical violence." We must march ahead, and never turn back and will continue to march until the rights of Africans Americans are met. He then acknowledges the journeys and suffering of those who were before him, and tells that when they return to their homes that this will be changed. It is here where he declares his famous dream that one day the United States will one day upheld the ideas that were written in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. A dream where all man can come together, a dream where the injustice of oppression will be soon wiped out, and a dream where one day his children will be "judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." With the faith of this dream man will stand together knowing that all will be free, and soon if African Americans and Whites work together they can "let freedom ring." When this happens, when freedom does ring, all people whether Black, White,  Jewish, Catholic, or Protestant will be able to sing that they are "free at last."