Next Monday Americans will celebrate Martin Luther King Day. It is a national holiday for a national hero, the only black man to be so honoured in the United States.
The Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr is of course the great icon of the civil rights movement in America. A Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1964 – the youngest person ever to win the Prize – his doctrine of civil disobedience and non-violent resistance ranks him alongside Mahatma Gandhi as one of the outstanding freedom fighters of the 20th century.
Martin Luther King Jr is perhaps most famous for his “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered at the climax of the March in Washington, on 28th August 1963, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. In addressing the 250,000 strong gathering of civil rights activists, Dr King made the case passionately, powerfully and compellingly for equal rights for Blacks in America and for racial harmony.
His speech that day is possibly the best known speech in America, along with Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. And it is no exaggeration to say that his oratory that day contributed to changing the course of American history, as President Lyndon Johnson was able to get the Civil Rights Act passed in July 1964.
Dr King’s rhetoric that day resonates just as powerfully today, particularly wherever injustice still exists, and his words and dream that day permeate the 2008 American election campaign:
“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed [as promised in the American Constitution and the Declaration of Independence]: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’
