USA TODAY International Edition
THREE PRESIDENTS ONE DREAM
The history of modern American race relations was displayed Wednesday on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
At the 50th- year commemoration of the March on Washington, the featured finale was delivered by President Obama — appropriately enough, as the nation’s first African- American president and an embodiment of the dream Martin Luther King had extolled on that same spot a half- century earlier.
“Because they marched, city councils changed and state legislatures changed and Congress changed and, yes, eventually the White House changed,” Obama declared to cheers and applause, one of few personal references he made in his speech. “America changed for you and for me.”
Also on the scene were two former presidents, each with his own ties to King and debts to the crusade he led. The speeches by Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter that preceded Obama’s were testimony to the impact King had on generations of white politicians as well as black ones, and they underscored the repercussions of the civil rights movement that reverberate in American politics to this day.
“I think most people know that it’s highly unlikely that any of us three over on my right would have served in the White House or be on this platform had it not been for Martin Luther King Jr. and his movement, his crusade for civil rights,” Carter, 88, said. “So we’re grateful to him for
WASHINGTON In his address to mark the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington on Wednesday, President Obama paid tribute to Martin Luther King and to the anonymous millions who stood by King’s side during the civil rights fight of the 1960s.
Obama remembered those who could not marry the ones they loved because of so- called anti- miscegenation laws, African- American soldiers who fought for freedom abroad that they could not enjoy on U. S. soil and white Americans who could not abide discrimination and sacrificed sometimes with their own blood.
“Because they marched, America became more free and more fair,” Obama said.
Before Obama took the stage Wednesday, former presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton offered stirring tributes to King.
Carter lamented what King might have thought about the recent Supreme Court ruling that gutted the voting rights laws that he fought for or the high unemployment rates plaguing the African- American com- munity. “There is a tremendous agenda ahead of us,” Carter said.
Clinton spoke about the racial divide he said still exists and the myriad problems facing the nation. He posited that King “did not die to hear his heirs whine about political gridlock.”
Obama wondered whether over the years, the progress that came in closing racial disparities obscured that the March was also about solving economic inequity. “They were there seeking jobs as well as justice.”
On that score, the president said, the country has fallen short of King’s vision, not just for blacks but for all working Americans. Though there have been examples of success in the African- American community that would have been unimaginable a half- century ago, black unemployment remains nearly twice as high as unemployment for whites, and Latinos are close behind. Middle- class Americans’ wages have stagnated while corporate profits soar.
“We might not face the same dangers of 1963, but the fierce urgency of now remains,” he said.