Part 11 of a Series

Washington, D.C., 1963

“I have a dream.”

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Everyone at Gettysburg knew whom Lincoln meant by “our fathers” at the beginning of his talk; it was far less clear whom he meant by “the people” at its end. A century later, Martin Luther King, Jr. set out to clarify that. Looking out from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, across to the Washington Monument and the Capitol beyond, he did not speak of a city on a hill, but of 350 years of slavery and repression, of the enslaver’s whip and the terrorist’s rope. He reminded 250,000 freedom marchers how far short of its rhetoric America has always fallen.

Yet we remember his speech, not as “The American Nightmare,” but as “I Have a Dream” – and not just any dream, but “a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. . . a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’” It was still, as Langston Hughes wrote, “a dream deferred” – in King’s words, a “promissory note” on which America has defaulted. “Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’” We must not, however, “wallow in the valley of despair,” he told his listeners of all races and walks of life. We must build together a city on a hill.

This, it seems to me, is the core of American Exceptionalism – not that America is – or has ever been – exceptional, but that we strive to be; not that the American people are better than others, but that every so often someone comes along and says, “we can be better than this.” Despite what Lincoln said at Gettysburg, that “the world will little note nor long remember what we say here,” it is, in fact, the words that we remember, and it is our collective failure to live up to them that brought Lincoln to Gettysburg and King to the Lincoln Memorial. Neither man said, “This is not who we are,” a mantra that has acted for centuries as an absolution for our worst behavior. On the contrary, they said, this is who we are – but it is not who we have to be.

The powerful have long manipulated the concept of American Exceptionalism, insisting that it explains the superiority of this nation. But it is the outsiders – from Emma Lazarus’s “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” to Raphael Warnock’s 2021 Senatorial victory announcement in Georgia that “only in America is my story even possible” – who have most intensely believed in it . . . and who, on the strength of that belief, have given it its true meaning.

O, yes,

I say it plain

America never was America to me,

And yet I swear this oath —

America will be!

- Langston Hughes

If there is a greatness to – and a hope for – this country, it is in those words.