The Worst of Our Fears

Back in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. made a speech for the ages at Washington, D.C. For a lot of folks, his most famous moment in history - & with it his brightest hour as a civil rights firebrand - was when he declared, "I have a dream" for the whole nation to take note of.

Over 45 years later, some say that his legacy & the very speech that defined it are frozen in time & they fear that something of that legacy is lost forever. Truly, we know that he had a dream. But we don't have any clue what that dream was or if it would have come true had he not been cut down by an assassin back in April 1968.

What was that dream MLK spoke of? Even now, we don't know. It seems that we can't go any further than those four words, that one sentence which has since come to define everything Martin Luther King stood for. But in doing so, we have come to ignore the full complexity of MLK himself & his message.

He wasn't just tackling issues like segregation. In fact, at the time of his death, he was taking on issues like poverty & the Vietnam War; the man came a long way since his declaration at Washington & it seemed that nothing could slow him down.

Yet by going outside the box as it were, he lost a great deal of support in the process. Not only did he lose the love of many newspaper & magazine publishers; his relationship with the White House also took a hit as well. In a sense, he became a pariah, an outsider looking in. Was this to say that King wasn't disliked back in 1963? He most certainly was back then; even up to his passing he was hated as much as he was loved.

That's one important aspect of MLK, I feel, that Americans should remember & take into full consideration. As our culture increasingly takes the top 10 approach in defining the heroes of the day, the most popular figures of all time, it also faces the severe danger of writing the past off as entertainment or a myth of legendary proportions. To write off MLK's accomplishments - or far worse to limit his personal philosophy & character to "I have a dream" - is doing our nation a major disservice to the man himself, as well as to the society in which we live.