On August 28, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a fervent, emotional sermon shaped by the language and spirit of democracy. Rather than a legal brief on the specifics of the civil rights bill or an intellectual treatise on the plight of the oppressed, the speech used King's mastery of the spoken word, magnetism, and sincerity to raise familiar platitudes from cliché to commandment. He hailed the gathering as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the nation's history, invoked the Emancipation Proclamation as a beacon of hope for millions of Negro slaves, and voiced his dream that justice, equality, and freedom would reach all God's children until they could join hands and say, "Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last."