I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation. Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon of hope to millions of Negro slaves, who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous …showed first 75 words of 222 total…

…showed last 75 words of 222 total…is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize a shamful condition. In sense we have come to our Nation's Capital to cash a check. When the architecs of our great republic wrote the magnificient words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.