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| This photo taken Aug. 26, 2013 shows President Barack Obama speaking in the East Room of the White House in Washington. Barack Obama was 2 years old and growing up in Hawaii when Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Fifty years later, President Obama keeps a bust of King in the Oval Office and a framed copy of the program from that historic day when more than 200,000 people gathered for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. |
WASHINGTON
(AP) -- Barack Obama was 2 years old and growing up in Hawaii when
Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech from the
steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Fifty years later, the nation's first
black president will stand as the most high-profile example of the
racial progress King espoused, delivering remarks Wednesday at a
nationwide commemoration of the 1963 demonstration for jobs, economic
justice and racial equality.
Obama believes
his success in attaining the nation's highest political office is a
testament to the dedication of King and others, and that he would not be
the current Oval Office occupant if it were not for their willingness
to persevere through repeated imprisonments, bomb threats and blasts
from billy clubs and fire hoses.
"When you are
talking about Dr. King's speech at the March on Washington, you're
talking about one of the maybe five greatest speeches in American
history," Obama said in a radio interview Tuesday. "And the words that
he spoke at that particular moment, with so much at stake, and the way
in which he captured the hopes and dreams of an entire generation I
think is unmatched."
In tribute, Obama keeps a
bust of King in the Oval Office and a framed copy of the program from
that historic day when 250,000 people gathered for the March on
Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
Within five
years, the man Obama would later identify as one of his idols was dead,
assassinated in April 1968 outside of a motel room in Memphis, Tenn.
But
King's dream didn't die with him. Many believe it came true in 2008
when Obama became the first black man Americans ever elected as their
president.
"Tomorrow, just like 50 years ago,
an African-American man will stand on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial
and speak about civil rights and justice. But afterward, he won't visit
the White House. He'll go home to the White House," Education Secretary
Arne Duncan said Tuesday, speaking of his basketball buddy and boss.
"That's how far this country has come. A black president is a victory
that few could have imagined 50 years ago."
"He
stands on the shoulders of Martin Luther King, and the sacrifices that
King made that make a President Obama possible are deeply humbling to
him," said Valerie Jarrett, one of Obama's senior advisers and a close
family friend.
For Obama, the march is a
"seminal event" and part of his generation's "formative memory." A half
century after the march, he said, is a good time to reflect on how far
the country has come and how far it still has to go, particularly after
the Trayvon Martin shooting trial in Florida.
A
jury's decision to acquit neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman in the
2012 fatal shooting of the unarmed, 17-year-old black teen outraged
blacks across the country last month and reignited a nationwide
discussion about the state of U.S. race relations. The response to the
verdict also raised expectations for America's black president to say
something about the case.
Race isn't a subject
Obama likes to talk about in public, and he does so only when the times
require it, such as the speech on race that he gave in 2008 when his
presidential campaign was threatened by the anti-American rantings of
his Chicago pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
In
his interview Tuesday with Tom Joyner and co-host Sybil Wilkes of the
Tom Joyner Morning Show, Obama said he imagines that King "would be
amazed in many ways about the progress that we've made." He listed
advances such as equal rights before the law, an accessible judicial
system, thousands of African-American elected officials,
African-American CEOs and the doors that the civil rights movement
opened for Latinos, women and gays.
"I think he would say it was a glorious thing," he said.
But
Obama noted that King's speech was also about jobs and justice. "When
it comes to the economy, when it comes to inequality, when it comes to
wealth, when it comes to the challenges that inner cities experience, he
would say that we have not made as much progress as the civil and
social progress that we've made, and that it's not enough just to have a
black president, it's not enough just to have a black syndicated radio
show host," Obama said.
When he was much
younger, it took Obama time to embrace his black-white, African and
American heritage. He chronicled that personal journey in his
best-selling memoir, "Dreams From My Father," in which he wrote about
himself as "the mixed blood, the divided soul, the ghostly image of the
tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds."
After
Zimmerman was acquitted, Obama spoke out to help people understand
black outrage over the verdict. In unusually personal terms, Obama
talked about experiences he shares with so many other black men, before
he became a well-known public figure, such as being followed in
department stores and hearing the click of car doors being locked as he
walked by.
He said the African-American
community was looking at the issue "through a set of experiences and a
history that doesn't go away."
In Wednesday's
speech, Obama will offer his personal reflections on the civil rights
movement, King's speech, the progress achieved in the past 50 years and
the challenges that demand attention from the next generation.
Obama has said King is one of two people he admires "more than anybody in American history." The other is Abraham Lincoln.
First
lady Michelle Obama is scheduled to join the president as he
commemorates the march. On the eve of the anniversary, Mrs. Obama
saluted one of the march's organizers Whitney Young at a screening on
Tuesday for the documentary "The Powerbroker: Whitney Young's Fight for
Civil Rights."
She called Young, who served as
executive director of the National Urban League during the 1960s, one
of the "unsung heroes in our history whose impact we still feel today."
"For
every Dr. King, there is a Whitney Young or a Roy Wilkins or a Dorothy
Height, each of whom played a critical role in the struggle for change,"
Mrs. Obama said. "And then there are the millions of Americans, regular
folks out there, whose names will never show up in the history books."
