President Obama delivered the closing remarks on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington Wednesday afternoon, striking the civil rights motion in a twenty first century context and offering an total hopeful message for the future in a virtually 30 minute lengthy speech. The president started through quoting from the Announcement of Independence about all men being “created equal,” and explaining how these unfulfilled promises resulted within the March on Washington in August, 1963.

Remembering Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s oratory that day, Obama mentioned, “His phrases belong to the a long time, possessing an influence and prophecy unmatched in our time.” However Obama additionally paid tribute to the “strange folks” who attended the march fifty years ago, individuals who’s names are not in the history books and had been never on TV. “that They had every motive to lash out in anger or resign themselves to a bitter fate, and yet they selected a unique course,” Obama said.

The president listed developments in equality for all individuals over the last fifty years, the use of the the refrain “As a result of they marched.” After citing quite a lot of “adjustments” for the better, Obama ended with, “And sure, ultimately the White Home modified” to cheers from the gang.

“To push aside the magnitude of this progress” or to “insist that nothing has modified,” Obama said, would “dishonor the braveness and the sacrifice of folks that paid the cost to march.” However on the related time, he mentioned that the pretend that there’s no more work to do would do the same “The arc of the ethical universe bends in opposition to justice,” Obama said, quoting King, “but it surely does now not bend on its own.”

President Obama referred to as on the American individuals to have the “braveness” to sort out the problems that still plague this country. “That’s where courage comes from—once we flip no longer from every other or on every different, however against one another,” he stated.

He ended his speech by using hailing the strange Americans who are nonetheless “marching” today, via preventing for equality in their own person methods, from the “mother who pours her love into her daughter in order that she grows up with the arrogance to walk thru the same doorways as any one’s son” to “the father who realizes the most important job he’ll ever have is raising his boy proper.”

Overall, rather than discuss to Congress about explicit plans or prescriptions for the future, President Obama used the 50th anniversary of the “I Have a Dream” speech to talk in an instant to the American individuals about what they can do to boost King’s dream.

Watch video beneath, by way of C-SPAN, in three components (transcript under that):

Read the entire transcript of President Obama’s speech under:

Let Freedom Ring 082813

[picture by the use of screengrab]

–