Martin Luther King Day is upon us for another year. “I have a dream” will be revisited like a sacred text. What a lot of people forget is that this was not part of the original speech. It was a happy accident of encoragement and inspiration.
Mahalia Jackson, the great singer, noticing the restless crowd, whispered to King,“Tell them about the dream, Martin.” From a speech of advocacy for rights, it becomes a sermon. No longer reading from a text, his head is up reading the heavens and the crowd.
Four years later, he would want to take it all back. Say the dream had turned into a nightmare. The next year, that nightmare would consume him.
We want to remember the dream, like one shining moment in the darkness. Perhaps we need that now, more than ever.
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