King telegraphs this to his audience by essentially quoting the opening lines of Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address, which began: “Four score 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.” Looking at King’s speech through the lens of sermon structure (he was a preacher, after all), Lincoln’s words could be viewed as the sermon’s epigraph (typically a Bible verse that the sermon goes on to analyze). So not only were he and the protestors at the March on Washington standing literally in Lincoln’s shadow-they were also standing metaphorically in the shadow of the actions he took to end slavery. King delivered his address from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, which looks out on the National Mall and the Washington Monument.
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