Name: President Obama's Speech on the 50th Anniversary of the March On Washington (Complete HD)
Uploaded: 2013-09-08T17:45:08.000Z
Duration: 29 min 15 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: To the King family, who have sacrificed and inspired so much,

to President Clinton, President Carter, Vice President Biden, Jill, fellow Americans, five

decades ago today, Americans came to this honored place to lay claim to a promise made

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed

by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty

In 1963, almost 200 years after those words were set to paper, a full century after a

great war was fought and emancipation proclaimed, that promise, those truths remained unmet.

And so they came by the thousands, from every corner of our country -- men and women, young

and old, blacks who longed for freedom and whites who could no longer accept freedom

for themselves while witnessing the subjugation of others. Across the land, congregations

sent them off with food and with prayer. In the middle of the night, entire blocks of

With the few dollars they scrimped from their labor, some bought tickets and boarded buses,

even if they couldn't always sit where they wanted to sit. Those with less money hitchhiked,

or walked. They were seamstresses, and steelworkers, and students, and teachers, maids and pullman

porters. They shared simple meals and bunked together on floors.

And then, on a hot summer day, they assembled here, in our nation's capital, under the shadow

of the great emancipator, to offer testimony of injustice, to petition their government

for redress and to awaken America's long-slumbering conscience.

We rightly and best remember Dr. King's soaring oratory that day, how he gave mighty voice

to the quiet hopes of millions, how he offered a salvation path for oppressed and oppressors

alike. His words belong to the ages, possessing a power and prophecy unmatched in our time.

But we  would do well to recall that day itself also belonged to those ordinary people whose names

never appeared in the history books, never got on TV.

Many had gone to segregated schools and sat at segregated lunch counters, had lived in

towns where they couldn't vote, in cities where their votes didn't matter. There were

couples in love who couldn't marry, soldiers who fought for freedom abroad that they found

denied to them at home. They had seen loved ones beaten and children fire- hosed. And

they had every reason to lash out in anger or resign themselves to a bitter fate.

And yet they chose a different path. In the face of hatred, they prayed for their tormentors.

In the face of violence, they stood up and sat in with the moral force of nonviolence.

Willingly, they went to jail to protest unjust laws, their cells swelling with the sound

of freedom songs. A lifetime of indignities had taught them that no man can take away

the dignity and grace that God grants us. They had learned through hard experience what

Frederick Douglas once taught: that freedom is not given; it must be won through struggle

That was the spirit they brought here that day.

That was the spirit young people like John Lewis brought that day. That was the spirit

that they carried with them like a torch back to their cities and their neighborhoods, that

steady flame of conscience and courage that would sustain them through the campaigns to

come, through boycotts and voter registration drives and smaller marches, far from the spotlight,

through the loss of four little girls in Birmingham, the carnage of Edmund Pettus Bridge and the

agony of Dallas, California, Memphis. Through setbacks and heartbreaks and gnawing doubt,

that flame of justice flickered and never died.

And because they kept marching, America changed. Because they marched, the civil rights law

was passed. Because they marched, the voting rights law was signed. Because they marched,

doors of opportunity and education swung open so their daughters and sons could finally

imagine a life for themselves beyond washing somebody else's laundry or shining somebody

else's shoes. (Applause.) Because they marched, city councils changed and state legislatures

changed and Congress changed and, yes, eventually the White House changed. (Cheers, applause.)

Because they marched, America became more free and more fair, not just for African-Americans

but for women and Latinos, Asians and Native Americans, for Catholics, Jews and Muslims,

for gays, for Americans with disabilities.

And the entire world drew strength from that example, whether it be young people who watched

from the other side of an Iron Curtain and would eventually tear down that wall, or the

young people inside South Africa who would eventually end the scourge of apartheid. (Applause.)

Those are the victories they won, with iron wills and hope in their hearts. That is the

transformation that they wrought with each step of their well-worn shoes. That's the

depth that I and millions of Americans owe those maids, those laborers, those porters,

those secretaries -- folks who could have run a company, maybe, if they had ever had

a chance; those white students who put themselves in harm's way even though they didn't have

to -- (applause) -- those Japanese- Americans who recalled their own interment, those Jewish

Americans who had survived the Holocaust, people who could have given up and given in

but kept on keeping on, knowing that weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in

the morning -- (cheers, applause) -- on the battlefield of justice, men and women without

rank or wealth or title or fame would liberate us all, in ways that our children now take

for granted as people of all colors and creeds live together and learn together and walk

together, and fight alongside one another and love one another, and judge one another

by the content of our character in this greatest nation on Earth.

To dismiss the magnitude of this progress, to suggest, as some sometimes do, that little

has changed -- that dishonors the courage and the sacrifice of those who paid the price

to march in those years. (Applause.) Medgar Evers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael

Schwerner, Martin Luther King Jr., they did not die in vain. (Applause.) Their victory

But we would dishonor those heroes as well to suggest that the work of this nation is

somehow complete. The arc of the moral universe may bend towards justice, but it doesn't bend

on its own. To secure the gains this country has made requires constant vigilance, not

complacency. Whether it's by challenging those who erect new barriers to the vote or ensuring

that the scales of justice work equally for all in the criminal justice system and not

simply a pipeline from underfunded schools to overcrowded jails -- (applause) -- it requires

And we'll suffer the occasional setback. But we will win these fights. This country has

changed too much. (Applause.) People of good will, regardless of party, are too plentiful

for those with ill will to change history's currents. (Applause.)

In some ways, though, the securing of civil rights, voting rights, the eradication of

legalized discrimination -- the very significance of these victories may have obscured a second

goal of the march, for the men and women who gathered 50 years ago were not there in search

of some abstract idea. They were there seeking jobs as well as justice -- (applause) -- not

just the absence of oppression but the presence of economic opportunity. For what does it

profit a man, Dr. King would ask, to sit at an integrated lunch counter if he can't afford

This idea that -- that one's liberty is linked to one's livelihood, that the pursuit of happiness

requires the dignity of work, the skills to find work, decent pay, some measure of material

Lincoln himself understood the Declaration of Independence in such terms, as a promise

that in due time, the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men and that all