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ABRAHAM, MARTIN AND JOHN

Anybody here seen my old friend Abraham? Can you tell me where he's gone? He freed lotta people but it seems the good they die young. You know, I just looked around and he's gone.

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…In a larger lincoln

sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and these dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our 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…we here highly resolve that the 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, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Address at the Dedication of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg, 19 November 1863, in R. P. Basler (ed.) Collected Works… (1953) vol. 7, p. 23, as reported the following day; the Lincoln Memorial inscription reads ‘by the people, for the people'.

Anybody here seen my old friend John? Can you tell me where he's gone? He freed lotta people but it seems the good they die young I just looked around and he's gone.

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

Inaugural address, 20 January 1961, John F. Kennedy, in Vital Speeches 1 February 1961, p. 227.

Anybody here seen my old friend Martin? Can you tell me where he's gone? He freed lotta people but it seems the good they die young I just looked around and he's gone.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood… I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.

Speech at Civil Rights March in Washington by Martin Luther King Jr., 28 August 1963, in New York Times.

Didn't you love the things that they stood for? Didn't they try to find some good for you and me? And we'll be free Some day soon, it's gonna be one day.

On the evening of April 4, 1968, while campaigning for the presidency, Senator Robert Kennedy was scheduled to speak at a rally in the heart of ghetto section of Indianapolis, Indiana. Enroute, he was given word that Dr. Martin Luther King had been shot and killed. Though he was warned of the potential for danger, he proceeded and gave one of the greatest extemporaneous speeches by anyone of that period. He spoke from the heart, without prompting from any speech writers. The following is an excerpt:

"What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or black."

Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby? Can you tell me where he's gone? I thought I saw him walkin' up over the hill With Abraham, Martin, and John.

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The song Abraham, Martin and John was written in 1968, with the words and music by Richard Holler.
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