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BARACK OBAMA star trek
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. REMEMBRANCE SPEECH

Good morning.  Praise be to God.  Let me begin by thanking the entire Vermont Avenue Baptist Church family for welcoming our family here today.  It feels like a family.  Thank you for making us feel that way.  To Pastor Wheeler, first lady Wheeler, thank you so much for welcoming us here today.  Congratulations on JordanDenice -- aka Cornelia. 
Michelle and I have been blessed with a new nephew this year as well -- Austin Lucas Robinson.  So maybe at the appropriate time we can make introductions. Now, if Jordan's father is like me, then that will be in about 30 years. That is a great blessing.
Michelle and Malia and Sasha and I are thrilled to be here today.  And I know that sometimes you have to go through alittle fuss to have me as a guest speaker. So let me apologize in advance for all the fuss.
We gather here, on a Sabbath, during a time of profound difficulty for our nation and for our world.  In such a time, it soothes the soul to seek out the Divine in a spirit of prayer; to seek solace among a community of believers.  But we are not here just to ask the Lord for His blessing.  We aren't here justto interpret His Scripture.  We're also here to call on the memory of one of His noble servants, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Now, it's fitting that we do so here, within the four walls of Vermont Avenue Baptist Church -- here, in a church that rose like the phoenix from the ashes of the civil war; here in a church formed by freed slaves, whose founding pastor had worn the unionblue; here in a church from whose pews congregants set out for marches and from whom choir anthems of freedom were heard; from whose sanctuary King himself would sermonize from time to time.
One of those times was Thursday, December 6, 1956.  Pastor, you said you were a little older than me, so were you around at that point? You were three years old -- okay. I wasn’t born yet.
 
On Thursday,December 6, 1956.  And before Dr. King had pointed us to the mountaintop, before he told us about his dream in front of the Lincoln Memorial, King came here, as a 27-year-old preacher, to speak on what he called "The Challenge of a New Age."  "The Challenge of a New Age."  It was a period of triumph, but also uncertainty, for Dr. King and his followers -- because just weeks earlier, the Supreme Courthad ordered the desegregation of Montgomery's buses, a hard-wrought, hard-fought victory that would put an end to the 381-day historic boycott down in Montgomery, Alabama.
And yet, as Dr. King rose to take that pulpit, the future still seemed daunting.  It wasn't clear what would come next for the movement that Dr. King led.  It wasn't clear how we were going to reach the Promised Land.  Becausesegregation was still rife; lynchings still a fact.  Yes, the Supreme Court had ruled not only on the Montgomery buses, but also on Brown v. Board of Education.  And yet that ruling was defied throughout the South -- by schools and by states; they ignored it with impunity.  And here in the nation's capital, the federal government had yet to fully align itself with the laws on its books and theideals of its founding. 
So it's not hard for us, then, to imagine that moment.  We can imagine folks coming to this church, happy about the boycott being over.  We can also imagine them, though, coming here concerned about their future, sometimes second-guessing strategy, maybe fighting off some creeping doubts, perhaps despairing about whether the movement in which they had placed so many of theirhopes -- a movement in which they believed so deeply -- could actually deliver on its promise.
So here we are, more than half a century later, once again facing the challenges of a new age.  Here we are, once more marching toward an unknown future, what I call the Joshua generation to their Moses generation -- the great inheritors of progress paid for with sweat and blood, and sometimes life...