Forty Years on


As many of you will know forty years ago yesterday on August 28th, 1963, after meeting with President John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to a crowd estimated at 250,000.


"I Have A Dream"


Sometime ago now I read Give Me Ten Seconds by John Sergeant and in a chapter titled "I Have A Dream" John Sergeant recalls how he felt as stood listening when Martin Luther King, Jr delivered the speech. John Sergeant recall's his feeling when Martin Luther King, Jr delivered the last paragraph "When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!".


After reading the speech again yesterday I realised that since the sixties we have come a considerable distance on fighting discrimination in many countries including our very own United Kingdom.


However unfortunately people are still being discriminated against and the fight against discrimination must go on. We must continue to fight to ensure that our children have the chance to grow up in a society where everyone is treated equally no matter what their gender, marital status, family status, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability, race, membership of the traveller community, HIV status or political affiliation. So the fight against discrimination and injustice must go
on!