I Have a Dream - My Own

August 28, 1963, Wednesday 

Day of MLK’s “I Have a Dream Speech.”

While I didn’t make a journal entry at the time, some undetermined time later, … still in my 20’s, I wrote the following piece:

 “In the time in which I lived, I heard a man stand before spine-tingling silence and say:

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

“And people sing, We shall overcome and it makes you want to cry ….  If they’ve got a dream, they’ve got more than 99% of mortal ghosts.

          “I’ve got a dream that I marry a beautiful and happy wife.  I am incomplete.

          I’ve got a dream that I’ll teach successfully, teach English and the tale I’ve got to tell.

          I’ve got a dream that my insincerity will not get the upper hand in me.

          I’ve got a dream that I’ll be young always.  I think I will. 

I’ve got a dream that somehow I can be a composite of all of the [truly] alive people who have poured illumination into me, who have showed me a spark.”

I date my intentional walk in life towards racial reconciliation –Black and White – to the one line of the “I Have a Dream Speech” that I quote above.  I am so provincial that when Dr. King mentioned “the red hills of Georgia,” my attention peaked. Not only do I live in the “red hills of Georgia,” it dawned on me, but I am the great-grandson of a Mississippi plantation and substantial slave owner. And, the Negros I saw around me were, most likely, “sons and daughters” of enslaved grandparents and great grandparents.  At the time of The March on Washington, we were less than 100 years from the end of the Civil War.

As you might guess by the self-centered nature of the personal dreams I state above, it was a few years later before I entered body and soul into the arena of racial reconciliation.