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National Memorial were first unveiled, they included a prominent place for the promissory-note metaphor, but as the project went forward the quotation was deemed “too confrontational” and dropped from the final design. When initial renderings for the new Martin Luther King Jr. This part of the speech has been mostly forgotten, swamped in collective memory by the soaring rhetoric of King’s peroration. “Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds,’ ” King said. The Declaration of Independence implied, and later the Emancipation Proclamation promised, meaningful freedom to African Americans. It is a stark metaphor, an accusation articulated in bluntly economic terms. “It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned.” And he went on to accuse the United States of being a moral skinflint when it came to honoring the debts of justice. “In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check,” he said, in what rhetoricians would call the exordium, or introduction, of his speech.
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delivered what is now known as his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, he began not with utopian images of racial harmony - children holding hands, black and white breaking bread together - but with the metaphor of a bad check. The political vocabulary of this year’s long, hot summer has been eerily reminiscent of what many consider the greatest political speech of the 20th century.Īs politicians played chicken with the national debt ceiling, they spoke of debt and default and the duty one generation owes to another.