Martin Luther King JR

“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,' " celebrated US civil rights leader Martin Luther King said in one of the most often quoted passages from his address on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC on Aug. 28, 1963.

It was a year when segregated restaurants and drinking fountains were still common in much of the American South, when American police set attack dogs and high- pressure fire hoses on nonviolent protesters and when Governor George Wallace tried to block black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama.

In August 1963, about 250,000 people participated in a "march on Washington for jobs and freedom." King was the last speaker that hot summer day, but his words transfixed the crowd. King's speech endures four decades later because it gave Americans a vision of a nation free of racial discrimination. It has come to be regarded as a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement an articulation of the values and qualities Americans aspire to. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968,but his philosophy of non violence, his vision and inspiration lives on.