St. Lawrence University: President

On November 19, 1863, with hundreds of Union and Confederate dead still unburied in the fields around it, the Civil War Cemetery at Gettysburg was dedicated. The main oration was given by the Honorable Edward Everett, a former president of Harvard and one of the most famous and highly sought after orators of the day. His speech recounting the war up to that point, and the battle itself in great detail, lasted over two hours.
Abraham Lincoln also spoke that day. The program called for him to make “Dedicatory Remarks” near its end, after Everett had finished. His address contained only 272 words, and he gave it in its entirety in less than three minutes.
Lincoln’s record on the issue of slavery is both complex and contradictory, as you know, but there is little doubt that his words at Gettysburg laid the rhetorical basis for a key element in the success of the Civil Rights Movement a century later—a movement we so closely identify with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
What Lincoln did at Gettysburg, as Garry Wills so stunningly shows, was
. . . . . cleanse the Constitution . . . . . . [by altering] the document from within, by appeal from its letter to the spirit . . .
You know by heart, I’m sure, Lincoln’s opening sentence:
Four score and seven years ago [the year of the Declaration of Independence, not the completion of the Constitution] our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation [the nation was founded in 1776, in Lincoln’s view; the state, and the Constitution that implemented it and determined how it would be governed, came later], conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
The spirit of the nation, its soul and central value system, implied Lincoln, is in the Declaration of Independence. The Constitution was the imperfect organizing document of the government that would henceforth manage the nation conceived in the Declaration. The words of the Constitution were the best that could be negotiated at the time. When the founders made provision for its amendment, Lincoln believed, they made it clear that they expected it would evolve with time, as indeed it has.
In Wills’ view:
. . . . [Lincoln] performed one of the most daring acts of open-air sleight-of-hand ever witnessed by the unsuspecting. Everyone in that vast throng of thousands was having his or her intellectual pocket picked. The crowd departed with a new thing in its ideological luggage, that new Constitution Lincoln had substituted for the one they brought there with them. They walked off, from those curving graves on the hillside, under a changed sky, into a different America. Lincoln had revolutionized the Revolution, giving people a new past to live with that would change their future indefinitely.
The reaction to Lincoln’s speech among those seeking racial justice was electrifying and positive. An American creed was born and installed like a new piece of software into the minds and hearts of Americans. But not all reactions were favorable. Some observers got it right away, understood the sleight of hand Lincoln had accomplished. Again I turn to Wills:
Some people, looking on from a distance, saw that a giant (if benign) swindle had been performed. The Chicago Times quoted the letter of the Constitution to Lincoln—noting its lack of reference to equality, its tolerance of slavery—and said that Lincoln was betraying the instrument he was on oath to defend. . .
It was to uphold this Constitution, [the Times said] and the Union created by it, that our officers and soldiers gave their lives at Gettysburg. How dare he, then, standing on their graves, misstate the cause for which they died, and libel the statesmen who founded the government? They were men possessing too much self-respect to declare that negroes were their equals, or were entitled to equal privileges.
In 1963, exactly 100 years later, Martin Luther King, Jr. was in jail in Birmingham, Alabama, for parading without a permit. His Letter From Birmingham Jail, required reading for all who would understand the America of that time, is a powerful cry for justice. In it he asks what it is that makes a law just or unjust, and answers that:
A just law is a code that squares with the moral law or the Law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.
Segregation, because it “degrades human personality,” is unjust.
An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself.
A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law.
Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First-Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.
It is moral to break an unjust law, King believed, but only if one does it non-violently and lovingly:
One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.
He broke our unjust laws over and over until we had the courage to change them.
The incredible power of King’s words and deeds we know from history. So that we don’t forget, we celebrate this day in his memory. But why were his words ultimately so powerful in moving us closer to the day when discrimination, racism, and other forms of racial injustice finally leave us forever? I believe that his approach had the enormous practical consequences it did in part because, as Gunnar Myrdal and others have pointed out many times, America does in fact have a conscience when it comes to the issue of race. Nazi Germany did not, but America does. Lincoln slipped the words of the Declaration of Independence into the psyche of the nation. Martin Luther King, Jr., reached into that psyche ingeniously, boldly, and bravely, and found a force that he could align with his own eloquent moral arguments to make change happen in America, and we must be deeply grateful.
The issue of race in America, of course, is not yet where it should be. We celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day not just because he was a great American. We celebrate it because the struggle is not yet over. When we remember him, we must be energized anew by his spirit. That is why we are gathered in this chapel today. Unless that is his legacy to us, he will have died in vain.