Doris Kearns Goodwin joined NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday to reflect on the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Doris Kearns Goodwin joined NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday to reflect on the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech and the March on Washington, which she attended in 1963. “There is a straight line from Martin Luther King backward to [Abraham] Lincoln backward to the Founding Fathers. They created an ideal of a country founded on the idea that all men were created equal. They knew all men were not created equal, we had slavery, but they knew we would force ourselves to move toward it. Lincoln moved us further through the Civil War ending slavery. Martin Luther King 100 years later got us even further to that ideal. What was so special about that march when I was a college student悠 remember the day, I remember the singing, I remember the worry beforehand about whether there would be mob violence傭ut most of all I remember the exhilaration; a feeling that I was part of something larger than myself. We were helping to make the country a better place.”