January 16, 2023. Martin Luther King Day.
We celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King is honored among many great leaders of the civil rights movement. He is one of many prominent leaders of the 20th Century. Inspired by his Christian beliefs, Dr. King advanced civil rights for people of color in the United States through nonviolence.
Dr. King was one of the leaders of the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered the famous "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The civil rights movement achieved pivotal legislative gains in the Civil Rights act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
Brief background history:
Dr. King called for civil and economic rights to end racism in the United States. Delivered to over 250,000 civil rights supports from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., the speech was a defining moment of the civil rights movement and one of the most iconic speeches in American History. With reference to the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared millions of slaves free in 1863, Dr. King said "one hundred years later, the Negro is still not free". The "I Have a Dream" speech narrates the gap between the American dream and reality. The "dream" of equality is often referenced as the centerpiece in civil rights speeches. The speech was hailed as a masterpiece of rhetoric. It employs the most widely cited example of the repetition of the phrase "I have a dream' to paint a picture of an integrated and unified America.
According to US Representative John Lewis who also spoke that day as the president of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). "Dr. King had the power, the ability, and the capacity to transform those steps on the Lincoln Memorial into a monumental area that will be forever recognized. By speaking the way he did, he educated, he inspired, he informed not just the people there, but people throughout América and unborn generations."
The speech draws upon appeals to social myths of the American nation founded on the principals to provide freedom and justice to all people, and then reinforces and transcends those secular mythologies by placing them within a spiritual context by arguing that racial justice is also in accord with God's will. Thus, the rhetoric of the speech provides redemption to America for its racial sins. Dr. King describes the promises made by America as a "promissory note" on which America has defaulted.
I still dream of Dr. King's dream. But the nightmare is real in which the struggle continues within the human narrative and social constructs.
Source: Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr.
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