Obama Celebrates and Honour Martin Luther King

An address by President Barack Obama will cap celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech.

Mr Obama is set to speak on the steps of Washington's Lincoln Memorial, the site of Dr King's address on August 28, 1963 before a crowd of 250,000 people.


Other speakers include former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.
The Lincoln Memorial ceremony will include bell-ringing at 3pm local time (8pm), 50 years to the minute after Dr King ended his call for racial and economic justice with the words "let freedom ring".
A march led by a replica of a transit bus that civil rights leader Rosa Parks rode when she refused to give up her seat to a white man in 1955 is also planned.

Mr Obama, the nation's first black president, considers the 1963 march a "seminal event" and part of his generation's "formative memory".

Mr Obama: 'Great progress since speech'

A half-century after the march, he said, is a good time to reflect on how far the country has come and how far it still has to go.
Mr Obama said Dr King "would be amazed in many ways about the progress that we've made".
He listed advances such as equal rights before the law, an accessible judicial system, thousands of African-American elected officials and CEOs.
He also noted that the civil rights movement's impulse for equality had spread to Hispanics, immigrants, gays and others.
"I think he would say it was a glorious thing," he said.

A march held on Saturday drew thousands to the Lincoln Memorial

But he also stressed that the legacy of discrimination had left a persistent economic gap between blacks and whites.
Almost half of Americans say much more needs to be done before the colour-blind society that Dr King envisioned is realised.
Mr Obama's address will wrap up more than a week of Washington events marking the anniversary, including a march on Saturday that drew tens of thousands to the Lincoln Memorial.
A clergyman and advocate of non-violence, Dr King was among six organisers of the 1963 'March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom', where he made his address.
The speech is credited with helping to spur passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act the following year.
Dr King, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, was assassinated by a white prison escapee in 1968.