"I have a deam"

I do not remember the now famous "I have a dream" speech. 

If you know me, you know that my saying I don't remember anything is a stretch.   I don't remember it because the plight of people whose skin was a different color than mine didn't seem to be a  consideration in my upbringing.  My siblings and I were taught to be kind to everyone - that was the "Christian thing to do". 

In the fifty years since that time, however, I have heard remarks from my dad that made me think he was a racist.   In fact I have been known to make disparaging remarks about him, saying that he was both a racist and a sexist only to be reminded by my children that "granddaddy was more a part of his generation than he was anything else" so I've learned to give him some slack rather than be critical of a father that I really loved and admired. 

And when I dig deep and remember the depth of love for others that both of my parents had, not to mention the way they believed in serving God, I know that we were taught that we are  all God's children.  

They even took us to Sunday school where we sang "Jesus loves the little children...red and yellow black and white - they are precious in His sight" and I think we meant it when we said it.

And then I read Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin who artificially darkened his skin to pass as a black man.  And I came to understand that some people, people who would be considered to be "good Christians", didn't really think that song we sang in Sunday school was true. 

When I was a junior in high school (shortly after the Walk on Washington when Martin Luther King, Jr. made his now famous "I have a dream" speech),  I wrote a short story about a the daughter of a plantation owner's friendship with with the daughter of one of the family's slaves. My teacher told me I was "dreaming", that would never happen. 

Was he right?  According to what we know about history - probably.

But that concept has never left my creative spirit - or my sense of God loving us all equally either for that matter.  I wrote another short story about a young white mother who had been widowed who fell in love with the black butler...and my idea was far from original.

The concept? We really are all the same.

Hum.

I remember vividly the first Martin Luther King holiday.  My children were in elementary and middle school.  I came home from work to find them saying repeatedly "I have a dream that some day my little black children will walk hand in hand with white children...".

And has that dream come true? I hope so but sometimes I'm not so sure.  I do know that the suggestion made in a song by Swedish pop group, Abba, makes a lot of sense to me.

"I have a dream, a song to sing  - To help me cope with anything
If you see the wonder of a fairy tale - You can take the future even if you fail
I believe in angels - Something good in everything I see
I believe in angels - When I know the time is right for me
I'll cross the stream - I have a dream"

Sometimes dreams come true - but that's another story!