In the following article, Eddings traces the influence of King's speech at the March on Washington on the civil rights movement and modern racial and political climates

Few issues are as clear as the one that drew a quarter-million Americans to the Lincoln Memorial thirty years ago this August 28. "America has given the Negro people a bad check," the nation was told. It had promised equality but delivered second-class citizenship, a back-of-the-bus status because of race. Few orators could define the injustice as eloquently as Martin Luther King Jr., whose words on that sweltering day remain etched in the public consciousness: "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."

The March on Washington had been the dream of a black...