Public Employee Press


The March 1963-2013
Obama Highlights

"In 1963, almost 200 years after those words were set to paper, a full century after a great war was fought and emancipation proclaimed that promise, those truths remained unmet," said President Barack Obama, who spoke at the 'Let Freedom Ring' ceremony to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on Aug 28.

After repeating the introduction to the U.S. Constitution that promises life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, Obama said more than 250,000 assembled in the nation's capital at the Lincoln Memorial "to offer testimony of injustice, to petition their government for redress and to awaken America's long-slumbering conscience."

The thousands included blacks and whites, laborers, cooks, students, seamstresses, steelworkers, teachers, maids and Pullman porters, union activists who sacrificed time and money to stand on the right side of history.

Through a soaring speech that is arguably one of the greatest ever spoken, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. challenged the nation to hold true to its promise and in his unmatchable rhetoric, "quieted the hopes of millions, and offered a salvation path for oppressed and oppressors alike," Obama said.

Those who remembered Dr. King and the many brave men and women who made history in 1963 included President Bill Clinton and President Jimmy Carter, Oprah Winfrey, the children of Dr. King, and freedom fighter Congressman John Lewis, one of the founders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

The spirit that behooved marchers to stand for justice and rail in peaceful protest against inequality and disparities, sustained them through the Montgomery boycott; the murders of Emmet Till and Medgar Evers; lunch counter sit-ins; undeserved beatings and unjust jailings; and the loss of four little girls in a Birmingham church bombed two weeks after the march by U.S. terrorists who went unpunished for their crimes to the carnage of Edmund Pettus Bridge.

"Through setbacks and heartbreaks and gnawing doubt, that flame of justice flickered and never died," Obama said. "And because they kept marching, America changed; civil rights law was passed; the voting rights law was signed, and doors of opportunity and education swung open so their daughters and sons could finally imagine a life for themselves beyond washing somebody else's laundry or shining somebody else's shoes.

"Because they marched," Obama said, "city councils changed and state legislatures changed and Congress changed and, yes, eventually the White House changed.

"America became more free and more fair, not just for African-Americans but for women and Latinos, Asians and Native Americans, for Catholics, Jews and Muslims, for gays, for Americans with disabilities," he said. "America changed for you and for me."

President Obama's entire speech at the "Let Freedom Ring" ceremony Aug. 28 is at www.whitehouse.gov.