US President Barack Obama has hailed Martin Luther King Jr for saving America from oppression but says "constant vigilance" is needed to keep the civil rights icon's dream of equality alive.
Fifty years after the "I have a dream speech", America's first black president stood poignantly on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, where King made an appearance in 1963 which changed history.
"He offered a salvation path for oppressed and oppressors alike," Obama said, in a ringing address, which he admitted beforehand would not match King's oratory.
"His words belong to the ages, possessing a power and prophecy unmatched in our time," Obama said.
Obama also remembered the thousands of African Americans who joined King's March on Washington to demand their rights and to wake their country's "long slumbering conscience".
The president, who has faced some criticism for not doing more to help the African American community, which remains plagued by poverty and barriers to advancement, dismissed arguments that little had changed for blacks since King spoke.
"To dismiss the magnitude of this progress, to suggest, as some sometimes do, that little has changed - that dishonours the courage and the sacrifice of those who paid the price to march in those years," he said.
But, in the speech below the monument honouring Abraham Lincoln, the president who ended slavery, Obama also argued that much work remained to be done for King's dream to be fulfilled.
"We would dishonour those heroes as well to suggest that the work of this nation is somehow complete," Obama said.
"The arc of the moral universe may bend towards justice, but it doesn't bend on its own."
Obama delivered his speech next to a giant bell that was salvaged from an Alabama Church where four young girls were killed in an arson attack in 1963.
The president was joined at the ceremony by former presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, revered civil rights leaders like King confidant John Lewis and members of the King family.
Carter bemoaned the "racist bullet" that claimed King's life in 1968.
Clinton said that it was time to open the "stubborn gates" barring wider opportunity.
"The choice remains as it was on that distant summer day 50 years ago. Co-operate and thrive or fight with each other and fall behind."
The march helped set the stage for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that outlawed major forms of racial discrimination, followed a year later by the Voting Rights Act, designed to guarantee the franchise for all black US citizens.
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