A skilled and charismatic orator and civil rights leader, Martin Luther King (1929–1968), called on America to redeem the promises of the nation’s founders that all people are created equal. In his “I Have a Dream” speech during the 1963 March on Washington, King asserted that “When the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. . . . We have come to cash this check.”