Bill Clinton: “and Freedom August 28, 1993 On this day 30 years ago, almost a quarter million Americans gathered in the shadow of the…”

“and Freedom August 28, 1993 On this day 30 years ago, almost a quarter million Americans gathered in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial to ask our Nation to uphold its founding ideals of equal justice and equal opportunity for all. As he looked at the crowd, Martin Luther King, Jr., must have been inspired by what he saw: people of every color, united in mutual respect and common purpose, representing America as it was meant to be and as it must be. In the words of A. Philip Randolph, whose vision of a multiracial movement for social justice inspired this historic demonstration, those who marched on August 28, 1963, were ``the advance guard of a massive moral revolution for jobs and freedom.'' Three decades later, we remember how far we have come on freedom's trail, and we rededicate ourselves to completing the journey. As a son of the South, I have seen in my own lifetime how racism held all of us down and how the civil rights movement set all of us free. We must never forget the hard-earned lesson that America can only move forward when we move forward together. That is why we rededicate ourselves to vigorous enforcement of the civil rights laws, to eradicating discrimination of every kind, and to opposing intolerance in all its forms. And we firmly believe that, as such visionary leaders as Martin Luther King, A. Philip Randolph, and Bayard Rustin understood three decades ago, jobs and freedom are inextricably linked.…”