One week before America’s 250th, Happy Birthday to a Great Patriot

Martin Dobrow with David Nolan in July 2024. Photo by Lenny Foster

Four score.

Those are the first two words of perhaps the most famous speech in American history: Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, on November 19, 1863.

Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Right in the middle of the Civil War, Lincoln reached back 87 years (“four score” – or 80 – plus 7) to our nation’s founding in 1776 to try to heal the great rupture and make our states united once again. He appealed to our patriotism. He appealed to our most noble ideals, to the better angels of our nature. Standing on the site of the deadliest battle in American history, he appealed to the living to honor the sacrifice of the dead by resolving that:

this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

From the Library of Congress

Almost exactly 100 years later, on August 28, 1963, the other candidate for most famous speech in American history was delivered in Washington, DC. Approximately 250,000 people gathered, many of them dangling legs of various hues in the healing waters of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool as Martin Luther King, Jr. lifted them up the metaphorical mountaintop.

The fierce urgency of now…

Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy…

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

Martin Luther King Jr. waved to supporters from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28, 1963, during the March on Washington. AFP | Getty Images 1963

On that majestic day in 1963, I was two years old: born in the South (my dad was in the Army, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina), but living in New York.

On that same day, David Nolan was 17. Born in the North, he was about to head south. He had chosen the University of Virginia, the great Jeffersonian campus, to become a history major. With a voracious curiosity and a steel-trap memory, he could have been a brilliant academic historian—except for one thing: the Civil Rights Movement. His heart told him that history in that moment demanded action more than study, so he dropped out to dig in.

Still transfixed by the way that yesterday guides tomorrow, David moved in 1977 to St. Augustine, Florida, the nation’s oldest city. He has become the city’s unparalleled civil rights historian. He has excavated a past that many in power would rather forget—or erase. His email address—containing the words “save our history”—became his rallying cry. He has fought many battles to preserve the city’s astonishing African-American history, winning some, losing others, always doing it in his signature style. (Chunks of the rubble from the demolished Monson Motor Lodge, the epicenter of civil rights protests in 1964, reside in garbage bags stored in his garage.)

David has also been a paragon of professional generosity. My forthcoming book, Original City, Original Sin: King, the Klan, and the Fight for Civil Rights in St. Augustine, Florida, simply could not have happened without his huge help over many years.

And so today, June 27, 2026, I want to salute a man who makes me reach back to the hope and eloquence of Dr. King and Abraham Lincoln. Happy 80th birthday to a truly great American.

Four score.