August 28th -- A Good Date For Historic Speeches

[Update: This article has been updated. I have received permission to credit the person who pointed out this coincidence, in a comment he made to another Huffington Post article, so it has been changed to add Brian Laws' name. I never cite commenters within the text of my articles, as a policy, unless I have their permission to do so.]

 

August 28th will be the final day of the 2008 Democratic National Convention. The keynote speaker will be the Democratic nominee for president. Unless Hillary Clinton soon acquires the ability to perform miracles, that nominee giving the acceptance speech is going to be Barack Obama.

And he will give a historic speech. He will be the first black man in this country's entire history to give such a speech. And if he's half the orator he's cracked up to be, he will use the following line at some point during the speech:

"Exactly two score and five years ago..."

Using the word "score" for "twenty" is about as archaic as you can get in American English. One might even call such usage "obsolete" rather than "archaic." But it is used in two episodes in the American story, by two of the best orators we've ever had. Which means every schoolchild in America knows that when Abraham Lincoln said "Four score and seven years ago" in Gettysburg, he meant "87 years ago, when the country was founded."

Barack Obama will surely not miss the chance to use it in a third history-making speech.

Because the second such historic speech is what he will be referring to. This speech begins with the lines:

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.

And it ends with the following:

And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

Free at last! Free at last!

Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

Forty-five years -- to the day -- after Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his "I have a dream" speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial, Barack Obama will be delivering the keynote address as the party's nominee at the Democratic National Convention. His speech is going to go down in history.

It's almost as if some crafty Democrats in party headquarters picked the date on purpose. If so, well done to the Democratic National Convention Committee (DNCC)! But even if it was merely coincidental, it is going to be noted by everyone as the date approaches. (I can't even take credit for noticing this convergence myself, as I read it in a comment made by Brian Laws on another article recently at the Huffington Post.)

Intentional or not, though, it's going to be a good date for a speech.

There is one thing worth mentioning here, since black ministers have already had an impact on the Obama campaign. If you read the full text of King's "I have a dream" speech, you may find passages that you forgot were in there. Every year on his birthday (or, more accurately, the closest Monday to his birthday), we get edited video clips of this speech on the television news. The speech is reduced to a few soundbites, which are considered palatable, uncontroversial, and uplifting. The myth is substituted for the fact.

The fact of the matter was Martin Luther King, Jr. was a black minister pointing out some rather uncomfortable and controversial realities about the southern United States of America. He does not mince words, either:

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 in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."

. . .

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

. . .

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of "interposition" and "nullification" -- one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today!

Even that last passage -- the key passage in the speech -- sounds a little different when not edited for today's television audience, doesn't it? You don't often see the King quote "vicious racists" every January when his birthday rolls around, do you?

I wonder what today's supercharged media environment would make of King's speech were it given today. When edited down for YouTube, which clips would endlessly play on what passes for television news these days? And would any politician running for national office defend him?

We tend to remember the warm, fuzzy parts of history, and not always the hard cold reality. King was fighting for basic human rights against a system not just of racial injustice in the South, but also a system where the entire rest of the country just looked away and pretended that such things didn't exist in America. King had to use some pretty strong language to make people pay attention to things that were real, injustices which existed in America, but which the media (and most of white America) just didn't want to think about. If he hadn't done so, civil rights legislation would have taken a lot longer, if it ever happened at all. To get things done, sometimes you have to be a little edgy.

That is the challenge for Barack Obama's acceptance speech. He needs to have a clear vision of what is right -- and what is wrong -- with America today, that everyone can hear and understand perfectly. That is the bar that he has to clear. If he can reach out to all Americans yearning to believe that politics can be good and uplifting again, with a single speech seen by more people than ever before -- and make them believe that he sees the injustices in their lives and cares about fixing them, no matter what the color of their skin is -- then John McCain should just go back to Arizona and take a nap, because Obama will win the election in a landslide.

And since it is a historic date for a speech for more than one reason, at some point in the speech, you will hear Barack Obama say:

"Exactly two score and five years ago..."

 

[Note to the Grammar Police: I refuse to use "an" in front of the word "historic" because there is just no reason for doing so. Do we say "an hysterectomy"? Or "an history teacher"? We do not. So while others seem to want to deify (vowelify?) the "H" in the word "historic" alone, they are just plain wrong. So there.]

 

Chris Weigant blogs at: ChrisWeigant.com