Page 18 - NYLS Magazine • 2014 • Vol. 33, No. 1

Fity Years

Ater the

‘I Have

a Dream’

Speech:

Carrying Forward

the Mission

By homas Adcock

A

ctivists and attorneys from the civil rights era of a half-
century past, along with New York Law School students

and faculty aiming to carry forward their mission, met
on campus on September 13, 2013, for a day-long symposium in

remembrance of the “I Have a Dream” speech by the late Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. he symposium was co-sponsored by the NYLS

Racial Justice Project, the Justice Action Center, the New York Law
School Law Review, and the American Civil Liberty Union’s Racial

Justice Program.

Delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington,

D.C., during a massive march on the nation’s capital in August 1963,

the speech and the dream prompted the seminar’s opening question,
“he speech he gave posed by the symposium organizer, Professor and Associate Dean

was a summons to for Academic Afairs Deborah N. Archer: Fity years later, she asked,
“What can we say?”
the conscience of

America. he speech “I think no one can deny that we’ve made progress,” said Dean
Archer, who is also Director of the Racial Justice Project. “We can
he gave followed
point to President Barack Obama.as an example of that progress.
events in our country.”
But in a year in which we saw a key piece of the Voting Rights

Act struck down, at the same time that we see renewed eforts
Clarence B. Jones
to disenfranchise communities of color.[and] we see increasing

disparities in wealth but decreasing social mobility, we have to
acknowledge we really have a long way to go before America’s

promissory note is fulilled.”

In mostly extemporaneous remarks, she and 13 other presenters

elaborated on that theme in words that were by turns gloomy and

optimistic—and oten as iery as Dr. King’s speech.

16 New York Law schooL magaziNe • 2014 • VOL. 33, NO. 1