History Written by ©2020 Sarah Becker Copyright ©2020 Sarah Becker August 28th – 57th Anniversary of the March On Washington “The liberty attained by that soul which is converted from evil by the influence of Divine love, is the only liberty which truly deserves the name,” Quaker minister, abolitionist and Alexandria apothecary Edward Stabler wrote in 1825. “The difference between this state, which has been the happy possession of many whose bodies were in bonds,—and mere personal freedom, is so great, that the one may be designated as being of heaven, the other of the earth.” Quakers understood discrimination. In 1656 Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritans greeted the first arriving Quakers with imprisonment. More than three hundred years later civil rights activist Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had a dream: “Five score years ago, a great American [Abraham Lincoln], in whose symbolic shadow we stand, signed the Emancipation Proclamation [January 1, 1863]. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice….” “But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free,” Dr. King continued. “One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation [Jim Crow] and the chains of discrimination…[W]e have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition.” “We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote,” Dr. King exclaimed. “No, no we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Justice as defined by The Oxford American Dictionary: “fairness, a fair claim; the…