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…. Proof of the importance the event’s organizers placed on Everett, a former Massachusetts governor and senator, is the fact that they delayed the ceremony by several weeks to ensure he could attend, said Allen Guelzo, a professor of Civil War-era studies at Gettysburg College and author of “Gettysburg: The Last Invasion.On August 28, 1963, in the most famous moment of the greatest mass-protest demonstration in US history, Martin Luther King, Jr., declared: His 13,607-word speech described the importance of the battle and consecrated the site. The focus of the 15,000 spectators crowded onto what four months earlier had been the site of the Civil War’s bloodiest battle was on Massachusetts orator Edward Everett.
Lincoln’s remarks were meant to be a second act. Civil War, famously beginning “Four score and seven years ago,” as the main event on November 19, 1863. Neither President Abraham Lincoln nor his listeners regarded the 272-word tribute to the soldiers who died at the pivotal battle of the U.S. President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address speech at the Library of Congress in Washington November 11, 2013. A woman photographs the Nicolay copy of U.S.
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