Coming of age in the 50's and early 60's as a son of a white sharecropper in the deep Old South, I became aware of the civil rights and human rights revolution being led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other great leaders of that era. This revolution helped educate me to the unfulfilled promises of the American democratic republic, and to me the movement was capped by Dr. King's 'I Have A Dream' speech on this day in 1963. I watched, learned and was inspired by the results produced by the generation before mine when the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Social Welfare legislation of 1965-1967 became law. Over time I came to regard these results as nothing less than the evolution of America to a new version of our republic, and I call it the Sixth American Republic. The crowning achievement of that revolution was the 1964 Civil Rights Act. For that we owe many but none so much as Dr. King. Today I honor his dream, his movement, his sacrifices and his tremendous service to our country and the results it led to.