Fifty years ago, in his “I Have a Dream” speech, Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check.  When the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.  This note was a promise that all men — yes, black men as well as white men — would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” 

That same year, in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” King wrote: