yesterday

From The Summit Daily News:
On Aug. 28, 1955, in Money, Miss., two white men kidnapped Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy who whistled at a white girl. The men beat Till, gouged out one of his eyes, shot him in the head, tied a cotton gin fan to his neck with barbed wire and hurled his body into the Tallahatchie River. A jury acquitted them, but the incident galvanized the civil rights movement, then in its infancy.

Eight years later, on Aug. 28, 1963, King stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial before 200,000 people and looked ahead to a day when the dynamic would be different.

"I have a dream," King said that day, "that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident — that all men are created equal. ... I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

And on Aug. 28, 2008, Barack Obama became the first black man to accept a major political party's presidential nomination.