○  we shall overcome  ○

of course, people cannot contribute to the nation if they are never taught to read or write, if their bodies are stunted from hunger, if their sickness goes untended, if their life is spent in hopeless poverty just drawing a welfare check. so we want to open the gates to opportunity. but we're also going to give all our people, black and white, the help that they need to walk through those gates.

my first job after college was as a teacher in cotulla, texas, in a small mexican-american school. few of them could speak english, and i couldn't speak much spanish. my students were poor and they often came to class without breakfast, hungry. and they knew, even in their youth, the pain of prejudice. they never seemed to know why people disliked them. but they knew it was so, because i saw it in their eyes. i often walked home late in the afternoon, after the classes were finished, wishing there was more that i could do. but all i knew was to teach them the little that i knew, hoping that it might help them against the hardships that lay ahead.

and somehow you never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the hopeful face of a young child. i never thought then, in 1928, that i would be standing here in 1965. it never even occurred to me in my fondest dreams that i might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students and to help people like them all over this country.

but now i do have that chance -- and i'll let you in on a secret -- i mean to use it.

and i hope that you will use it with me.

this is the richest and the most powerful country which ever occupied this globe. the might of past empires is little compared to ours. but i do not want to be the president who built empires, or sought grandeur, or extended dom

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