Here’s Martin Luther King, Jr’s famous “I Have A Dream” speech in full on YouTube:
When I was a child, my uncle asked me to find the full text of this speech and copy it for him, as he had recently joined the Toastmasters and wanted copies of famous speeches. I was only a kid without walkable access to the library, so I did what I could: I copied the excerpt that everybody is familiar with out of the “Martin Luther King, Jr.” entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica (we had a six year old set at the time), and typed it up on the screen of our Commodore 64. Twenty five years later, I can watch the full speech any time I have access to a computer, which is 90% of my day.
Forty-six years after Martin Luther King, Jr made that historic address at the Lincoln Memorial, back when it was still legal to bar a white woman from marrying a black man and de facto legal to stop black people from voting, we’ve elected a black man to be our president, with unprecented popularity and support for a president-elect. At the same time, on the YouTube page of King’s speech, comments had to be turned off because of all the hateful racist slurs directed against him, one of the most intelligent and gifted orators in our history. We still have a long way to go.
My hope is that the changes in my experience, from growing up without direct access to information to having it at my fingertips, will continue to help us along in the path toward King’s dream. It might be hoping too much, but then again, even a year ago prominent voices told me that Obama could not be elected president because of his race. It’s human to hope, and I’m not giving that up.
Yesterday, I heard Tavis Smiley claim Martin Luther King as the greatest American who ever lived. I have no idea what that means.
We do a great disservice to history today if we forget Frederick Douglass. Douglass was born a slave and escaped his bondage. He became a fierce opponent of slavery, but was intelligent enough to know John Brown was living in a fantasy land with his idea of creating a slave uprising.
Douglass pushed Lincoln, a moderate on abolition, to the position of emancipation. Douglass recognized the greatness of Lincoln.
And, after the war, Douglass campaigned against Jim Crow and tried to keep alive the idea that the Civil War was about slavery and freedom and fought back against the rising of Lost Cause mythology.
Douglass belongs in the Pantheon of Great Americans and today is a good day to learn a little more about him.