King’s words still resonate

Just more than 48 years ago, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. stood in Washington, D.C., at the Lincoln Memorial and delivered what is widely considered to be not only the defining speech of the Civil Rights Movement, but the top American speech delivered in the 20th century.

Speaking to more than 200,000 civil rights activists who had assembled Aug. 28, 1963, King stood at the monument dedicated to the U.S. president who had started African Americans on the road to freedom a century earlier through the Emancipation Proclamation. That road, however, had not been one easily traveled and in many areas, including our state, blockades had been erected over the decades.

King