![]() ![]() The same summer as the March on Washington, Malcolm X had warned, "A bill is owed to us and must be collected." Scholar Eric J. Other civil rights leaders had used similar language, often with apocalyptic overtones. If the Civil War continues, said Lincoln, "until all the wealth piled up by the bondman's 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword," then that was God's will. Less than a month before King's speech, a writer for Newsweek used a similar image, noting that African Americans had "demanded payment of theĬentury-old promissory note called the Emancipation Proclamation." King's speech explicitly invoked the memory of Abraham Lincoln, who had used the idea of debt and payment in his second inaugural address. The metaphor of a check or promissory note was standard in political discourse at the time.
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