A Dream Turned into a Nightmare: MLK and Continuing to Dream

On Monday morning, I woke up to a text from a friend warning me about the presence of ICE agents in Bryan/College Station. A flurry of emotions cascaded within me, but my immediate thought was, “it’s Martin Luther King Day. They are actually doing this on MLK day.” And then, all I could think of was the very speech I had shown in Kairos, our Youth Group gathering, the night before. It was a speech that Dr. King gave at Ebenezer Baptist Church in 1967, 11 months before his assassination. And it contains a sentiment that is not often discussed when the universally uplifting “I have a dream” speech takes precedent. You see, when asked about this speech during the interview, Dr. King admits that his dream had, at many points, turned into a nightmare. Almost 60 years later, on the day that was established to honor his legacy, when so many echo the sentiments of King’s “dream,” it was playing out in the streets of this nation as a nightmare. A nightmare we share in knowing the history of which he speaks, and the tension we find ourselves in as that history is continually censored amid an ever-increasing rise of authoritarianism and indifference.

The many collections of words that Dr. King spoke in his short 39 years of life are just as relevant today in a world that is increasingly violent in its indifference to the suffering of our neighbors. And I was grappling with the weight of our current situation, along with so many others. And so, I looked to the voices of the great theologians out there, as I so often do, to find words of hope. Who better than the author of the book Resurrection Hope, the great Rev. Canon Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas. She offered a homily at a vigil held this past Monday in New York City, and at the beginning of her sermon, she offered these words,

“We are living in despairing times.”

As I heard this, I let out a genuine sigh of relief. It might seem a strange emotion to experience at such an admittance from one of the nation’s greatest theologians, but it is in that mutuality of communal grief that I believe we also find our collective strength.

Dr. Douglas admitted to these despairing times, and then she offered this prophetic reminder of the state in which despair hopes to render us,

“Despair is the soil in which oppressive and authoritarian regimes take root and thrive. Despair paralyzes, it convinces us that nothing will ever change, and before we know it, we begin to compromise, to comply, and to concede. We settle for silence. We go along to get along. And slowly we lose sight of our own values. We lose sight of our own moral bearings, even losing sight of who and whose we are.”

So, from the example of a man who spoke both of dreams and nightmares, how are we to continue his legacy? Dr. Douglas offered this,

“Simply put, to remember the lessons King is teaching us rightly is to refuse illusions of freedom, and to stand again, and again, and again, for the sacred humanity, and thus the freedom, of all.”

I witnessed a great deal of people gathered in solidarity for the sacred humanity for all at the MLK march held in our community on Monday. It was the best weather we’ve had in years on that day, and the sun shown brightly on God’s people gathered to be seen, known, and heard for their continued belief in the freedom of all people. Voices were lifted, through music, through the words of a local superintendent who said that we were made for diversity and that is what the world should see. They were lifted through the words of the keynote who spoke of the ways she resisted a world that had made her body feel in a constant state of stress as a Black woman working twice as hard for half the credit. Babies played in the bleachers while people called out the names of their ancestors. The joy in that room was the greatest act of protest I could have witnessed that day.

We are sharing in a nightmare, but we are still, very much, continuing to dream. And perhaps, in our continued dreaming, we may, as King spoke exactly one year before his death, “be able to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace.”