August 28th will be the final day of the 2008 Democratic National Convention. The keynote speaker will be the Democratic nominee for president. Unless Hillary Clinton soon acquires the ability to perform miracles, that nominee giving the acceptance speech is going to be Barack Obama.
Senator Obama will give his acceptance speech on August 28, the forty-fifth anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.
And he will give a historic speech. He will be the first black man in this country's entire history to give such a speech
Assuming he wins in November. Obama will be inaugurated less than three weeks before Abraham Lincoln's two-hundredth birthday.
The symbolism of the first major party African-American presidential nominee accepting his party's endorsement on the day when King, four-and-a-half decades earlier, had called on the nation to fulfill its long-deferred ideals, and of the first African-American president being inaugurated less than a month before the nation celebrates the bicentennial of the "Great Emancipator" should be enough to bring tears to the eyes of even hardened political cynics.
But the deep historical significance of what is currently happening goes even farther.
In so many ways, Barack Obama is a realization of King's dream.
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