Four score and seven years ago…
By Susan Shaffer
November 20, 2013
Those six words begin one of the most famous speeches in American history. Ironically, President Abraham Lincoln went on to predict – incorrectly – that we would not remember what was said during the dedication at Gettysburg. We did remember. We do remember. It is engrained in our national conscience. His words gave us the shared language to describe the battle that had been fought and the battle that lay before us.
Sheryl Denbo and I founded MAEC one score and two years ago. We believed in the possibility of equality in education for all children. We watched as Title I provided for equal access to education, Title III benefited English language learners, and Title IX encouraged and protected girls in sports and other activities. We wanted to help.
Yes, in the 150 years that have passed since President Lincoln made his remarks, we have made great strides as a country to recognize that all people are created equal. We can be proud. But our work is not over.
Yesterday was the anniversary. I read Lincoln’s words again:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
