Sublime

Kennedy promised to fight for civil rights with all the powers of the presidency, “as legislative leader, as Chief Executive, and as the center of moral power of the United States.”

In 1967 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. challenged African Americans to “develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness.”

At Gettysburg in the spring of 1963, the centennial year of President Lincoln’s address at the dedication of the cemetery there, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson went to the Pennsylvania battlefield to speak at a Memorial Day commemoration. “One hundred years ago, the slave was freed,” Johnson said. “One hundred years later, the Negro remains in

“We are here this evening—for serious business,” King told the huge crowd on Monday, December 5, 1955. “We are here in a general sense, because first and foremost—we are American citizens—and we are determined to apply our citizenship—to the fullness of its meaning.”