“Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation.”

In the second line of the speech, King harkens to Abraham Lincoln’s famed Gettysburg Address, a speech made nearly 100 (five score) years before King’s address. Lincoln opened with the lines “Four score and seven years ago,” and King’s reference is apt both for the location of the speech—the Lincoln Memorial—and also the theme of the speech: the promises made by the US to but not realized by Black Americans. It is one of several historical allusions in King’s speech.

“One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land.”

King makes several references to what was promised Black Americans and what was delivered. In this line, he again references Lincoln and, specifically, the Emancipation Proclamation which eliminated the institution of slavery in Confederate states during the Civil War. The elimination of slavery was eventually law throughout the United States (with the 13th Amendment), but King notes Black Americans, 100 years later, still lack full equality, leaving them exiled and stranded in the confines of their own nation. The idea of exile has biblical connotations as well, with implicit references to Adam and Eve being exiled from the Garden of Eden just as Black Americans are exiled from the paradise of freedom in America.