Writ 101
Professor Jill Davis
February 16 2014
On August 28 1963, the one hundred anniversary of president Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation, Reverend Martin Luther King delivered the now famous “I have a Dream” speech at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. Dr. King wasn’t just a man who gave a speech. He was a man with a dream and in that dream, he set a tone that would ring in America for the rest of history. This speech brought to the minds of many inattentive American’s a previously unknown civil rights orator, speaking of truths of racial discrimination and inequality in a manner that could no longer be easily ignored. This speech would ring true in America from that point forward because of its direct, truthfulness ease and the obvious reality with it described from the personal perspective of African Americans.
The 1960s was a pivotal period in American history. Social crises were being reached on a number of levels, including the increasing skepticism over American involvement in Southeast Asia. Civil rights issues were becoming prominent as Negros were increasingly aware of growing injustice in an country which claimed that “all men were created equal.” Dr. King helped us open our eyes in order to set not only the blacks from being inferior to whites, but as equals. They saw, from Dr. King, that the reality was far from the profession. Dr. King was a man with many goals in life. He started his educational goal by attending Atlanta University Laboratory School and Booker T. Washington High School. Because of his high score on the college entrance tests in his junior year of high school, he went on to Morehouse College without formal graduation from Booker T. Washington. Having skipped both the ninth and twelfth grades, Dr. King entered Morehouse at the age of fifteen. In 1948, he graduated from Morehouse College with a Bachelors degree in Sociology. That fall, he enrolled in Crozer Theological Seminary in