This picture is of the view from the Lincoln Memorial toward the Washington Monument on August 28, 1963 as Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his I Have a Dream speech in Washington D.C. The speech has been called the greatest American speech of the 20th century, and the paramount of civil rights movements. The crowd is filled with civil right activists, including the queen of gospel Mahalia Jackson. I think what provokes me the most about this image is the fact that the number of people who attended this speech starts at the Lincoln Memorial and goes all the way back to the Washington Memorial. It makes me proud that so many people attended, with the assumption that more wanted to come than could, and, at the same time, it makes me disappointed that we had to have such an event in the first place.
"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 light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination."
There is still a great amount of discrimination in our nation today, whether it's against African Americans, same sex couples, Muslims, whomever. And it's a sad day in America when anyone is discriminated against due to such prejudice. America is a salad bowl country, and I believe that anyone who doesn't see that such prejudices will tear us, as a country, apart, just as it has before. I have a dream that one day, America won't experience such... foul wizardry.
"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 light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination."
There is still a great amount of discrimination in our nation today, whether it's against African Americans, same sex couples, Muslims, whomever. And it's a sad day in America when anyone is discriminated against due to such prejudice. America is a salad bowl country, and I believe that anyone who doesn't see that such prejudices will tear us, as a country, apart, just as it has before. I have a dream that one day, America won't experience such... foul wizardry.
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