all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘free at last! free at last! thank God almighty, we are free at last!’3 King’s flair for oratory should not obscure the philosophical assumptions on which his earnest and articulate outcry was founded. His moral appeal flowed from his conviction that America’s deepest ideals, though imperfectly implemented, were true to a moral