MARTIN LUTHER KING'S "I HAVE A DREAM" SPEECH

                         AUG. 28, 1963
                         
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 Proclaimation.  This
momentous decree came as a great beacon of hope to millions of
slaves, who had been seared in the flames of whithering
injustice.  It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of
their captivity.  But one hundred years later, the colored
American is still not free.  One hundred years later, the life of
the colored American is still sadly crippled by the manacle of
segregation and the chains of discrimination.

One hundred years later, the colored American lives on a lonely
island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material
prosperity.  One hundred years later, the colored American 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 shameful condition.

In a sense we have come to our Nation's Capital to cash a check.
When the architects of our great republic wrote the magnificent
words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,
they were signing a promissory note to which every Anerican was
to fall heir.

This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as
white men, would be guaranteed to the inalienable rights of life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness.