I have the pleasure to present to you Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I am happy to join with you today.

In what will go down in history

as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago,

a great American in whose symbolic

shadow we stand today,

signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

This momentous decree came

as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves

who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice.

It came as a joyous daybreak

to end the long night of their captivity,

but one hundred years later,

the Negro still is not free.

One hundred years later,

the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation

and the chains of discrimination.

One hundred years later,

the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty