Second Reconstruction reached a crescendo in the mid-1960s, with Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, then passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Though he spoke from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King declared that he had come to collect on a “promissory note” issued by Thomas Jefferson, thereby linking the goals of the civil rights movement back to the original formulation of the American Creed, which King also described as an expanding mandate that now included the descendants of Jefferson’s slaves.
