President Obama’s speech to mark the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington has been highly anticipated since he announced it: the nation’s first African-American president in the spot where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made his famous speech.
Aware of the significance, Obama was quick to lower expectations in an interview he gave on Tuesday. Obama told Tom Joyner & Sybil Wilkes that he’s still working on the speech he’ll give Wednesday on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and that no one should expect a speech quite as impressive as Dr. King’s.
“Let me just say for the record right now, it won’t be as good as the speech 50 years ago. I just want to get that out there early,” he said. “Because when you are talking about Dr. King’s speech at the March on Washington, you’re talking about one of the maybe five greatest speeches in American history. And the words that he spoke at that particular moment, with so much at stake, and the way in which he captured the hopes and dreams of an entire generation I think is unmatched.”
“And so all I can do on an occasion like this is just to celebrate the accomplishments of all of those folks whose shoulders we stand on and then remind people that the work is still out there for us to do, and that we honor his speech but also, more importantly in many ways, the organization of the ordinary people who came out for that speech,” he added. “We honor them not by giving another speech ourselves–because it won’t be as good–but instead by just doing the day-to-day work to make sure this is a more equal and more just society.”
The president also acknowledged that his own accomplishment–becoming the first African-American man to inhabit the White House–is not enough to achieve the “dream” and that if he were around today, Dr. King would probably believe more work still needed to be done.
“I think that Dr. King would be amazed in many ways about the progress that we’ve made,” he said.
“What he would also say, though, is that the March on Washington was about jobs and justice,” he added. “And that when it comes to the economy, when it comes to inequality, when it comes to wealth, when it comes to the challenges that inner cities experience, he would say that we have not made as much progress as the civil and social progress that we’ve made, and that it’s not enough just to have a black president.”
“The question is, does the ordinary person, day-to-day, can they succeed,” he continued. “And we have not made as much progress as we need to on that, and that is something that I spend all my time thinking about, is how do we give opportunity to everybody so if they work hard they can make it in this country.”
That’s a sentiment a majority of Americans apparently agree with too, according to a NBC/WSJ poll released in July which found only a slight majority of all Americans–and not even one-in-five African-Americans–believe that Dr. King’s dream has been realized.
When asked about the anniversary of the March on Washington during an event at Binghamton University last week, the president spoke about the importance of increasing access to quality education as a tool to help achieve greater equality in this country.
His response was thorough:









