Today, Aug. 28, marks 62 years since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial.

Listen to it, and watch it if you can. Watch as King shifts from the formality of a speaker reading from a prepared text to one of an impassioned preacher. Watch as the hand of a National Park Service ranger, Gordon “Gunny” Gundrum, lowers the microphones arrayed before King, a visible recognition of this white man’s understanding of the import behind what this Black man was saying. Watch as King looks out on the crowd below, looks out to the distant horizon, as if envisioning the dream he shared with his audience.

Listen to it if, for no other reason, than to be swept away by the current of oratory otherwise so lacking in American public life today. And listen a

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