Tags
When President Barack Obama takes to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial today for his scheduled 2:45 pm address to the thousands of people who will mass there for the 50th anniversary celebration of the March on Washington, it won’t be the first time he’s stood in the shadow of Martin Luther King.
Four years ago Obama went to Oslo, Norway to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, an honor King received 45 years earlier. King was leading a campaign of nonviolent resistance to racial injustice in this country when was given the world’s most prestigious peace prize. Obama, who had won election as this nation’s first black president just 13 months earlier, got his prize “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples” even as the U.S. was in the midst of two wars.
“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 during a recent interview on the Tom Joyner Morning Show. “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.”
Read more here