Mlk Speech Story

There had been many reasons for people to cheer yesterday during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. More cameras were set up to cover the event than there were three years ago for President Kennedy's inauguration. At least 500 cameramen, correspondents, and technicians from the three major television networks showed up to film the speech.

As 250 thousand people gathered around the Lincoln Memorial yesterday, they were given their greatest reason to cheer. The fight and desire for racial harmony was epitomized by Martin Luther King, Jr. as he urged his audience to seek equality.

King, representing the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), turned the steps of the memorial into his podium where he spread the word of "his dream" to the many spectators. "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: Ð''We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,'" he said.

Some of his other dreams were to see his children live in a world where they are not judged by their skin color, black children in Alabama to be able to join and hands with white children in brotherhood, and for the sons of former slaves to be able to sit at a table with the sons of former slave owners.

"Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children," he said.

King, a Baptist minister since 1953, has been part of the Civil Rights movement for some time. He led the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, which resulted in an arrest and his house being bombed. This arrest led to the Supreme Court decision of 1956 that outlawed segregation in all public transportation.

Two years later, he played a role in founding the SCLC, a group meant to combine black churches and conduct nonviolent protests.