Dr. King’s Dream Must Be Our Own

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! Free at Last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

The words Martin Luther King so stirringly delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28, 1963, resonate for us now as perhaps never before.

That speech, considered by many the greatest ever uttered by the human voice, was more than a recitation of wrongs perpetrated by whites on blacks. It was, in a much larger sense, a call to brotherhood, an affirmation of the unity of humankind, a denunciation of violence and an invocation of the Christian faith.

So, too, is today’s Martin Luther King birthday march in Southern Pines, when people of different races and different religions stride shoulder to shoulder across our town on their way to Southern Pines Primary School. There, Associate Justice G.K. Butterfield of the N.C. Supreme Court will deliver the day’s keynote address. Similar observances are being held, as King would say, in villages and hamlets, states and cities across America. Today’s celebratory events were a far cry from those dark days of the early 1970s, when Southern Pines was the scene of race riots.

King’s immortal words — and today’s comemmorations of his life and work — are particularly timely in the continuing wake of Sept. 11., as people all over the world look to each other for spiritual and emotional support. King reminds us yet again that when people — be they black or white, Jew or Gentile, Muslim or Hindu — are done wrong by institutions and individuals, they are morally bound to shun violence as they seek redress of those grievances.

King’s philosophy of passive resistance broadened the appeal of the civil rights movement and brought it into America’s political and social mainstream. Had it become widespread, the violence that was preached in the 1960s by that era’s black and white Osama bin Laden’s would have doomed the movement to failure and racially divided us for generations to come.

King’s rejection of violence was grounded in his faith in the essential goodness of his fellow men and women and his belief in American democracy. Those articles of faith allowed him to harbor a dream. “It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream,” he said at the Lincoln Memorial. “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’”

Thus he boldly dreamed of a day when the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners would be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood, a day when his four children would live in a nation where they would not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

That dream is given triumphant renewal today in Southern Pines and across our country. Those who march strengthen the cause of civil rights and the non-violent pursuit of justice. They serve notice on the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks that lunatic extremism will never turn the American dream, Martin Luther King’s dream, into a nightmare.

To be sure, it is a dream that is not yet fully realized. The goals of universal racial justice and human brotherhood remain elusive in a world beset by war, oppression and poverty. But as Martin Luther King taught us, they are attainable as long as men and women of good will continue to strive together by peaceful means toward the lofty ideals he so eloquently espoused.