In citing an “old Negro spiritual”, King makes it clear that America will finally realize its full potential when it recognizes “all of God’s children, Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics” as free human beings and equal citizens. In King’s view, the struggle of African Americans is a struggle for America, not against it – a struggle to help America finally and fully live up to its own principles of self-government proclaimed in the Declaration and advanced by great statesmen like Abraham Lincoln. It’s why King’s civil rights protestors carried the American flag in their marches.