Politics: Promissory Note

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's David Shribman makes some excellent observations as we approach the anniversary of King's March on Washington and the "I Have a Dream Speech." Read:

And so, in an anniversary month when the familiar ending of the Dream speech will be aired from Bangor to Bakersfield, it is worth contemplating the rest of King's remarks. At this distance -- four decades in which the principle of civil rights has been broadly accepted, leaving the details to work out -- the beginning of the speech may even be more haunting than its conclusion.

King spoke a century after Lincoln's act of emancipation, arguing that black Americans were "still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination," pointing out that a hundred years after slavery "the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity."

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That's why the King speech resonates. It is remembered as the "Dream" speech, but in truth it is the "Promissory Note" speech. Before tens of thousands of people gathered in the center of the capital, King set forth the challenge of America. What he demanded was not the fulfillment of a dream. He demanded the fulfillment of an obligation.

Listen to how he put it: So we have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition. In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.

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On that day in 1963, King charged his own country with defaulting on its most sacred promissory note, and from this distance we can see that the moral power with which he did it helped change America's mind:

Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check -- a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

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The King speech reminds us that when one part of the United States is impoverished, the entire nation is the poorer. Moments before he launched into his dream refrain, King sought to answer critics who wondered, even then, when he and his compatriots would be satisfied. "No," said Martin Luther King, giving the speech of his life five years before his life would end, "no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." When should we -- black, white, all of us -- be satisfied? Two-word answer: Not yet.