“I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.
This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.”
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Speaking to a quarter million people on the national mall and uncounted millions via the television, this moment was his biggest audience to date. The speech begins with carefully-composed rhetoric. It echoes the Gettysburg Address, the biblical prophets, Shakespeare. If you listen to the audio recording, the crowd is with him.
But partway through the speech, King departs from his prepared words. The style becomes looser, and the most famous part, the part we all remember, “I have a dream” was not supposed to be in this speech at all. King had developed the theme in previous speeches, and gospel singer Mahalia Jackson called out, “tell ‘em about the dream, Martin!”
Sources disagree about whether his use of the “I have a dream” theme that day was in response to Jackson’s urging, but now it’s how we refer to the whole speech.
I’m not knocking one of the most brilliant orators of the 20th century. I’m calling our attention to the fact that sometimes we have to let go of the careful plans and get to the heart of the matter. What are we really doing here? When in doubt, tell ‘em about the dream. The dream, the hope, the faith.
Prophecy is not just telling everyone that it’s going to be bad. Or that it’s bad now. Prophecy is connecting this moment to the future and the people to their convictions. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched with King, wrote that the prophet is the one who feels with God, whose compassion is with God’s people and exhorts them to transform their lives and/or the world to live into the promise of God’s justice.
You know, Beloved Community. That’s how we talk about it now. King didn’t say those words in the “I Have a Dream” speech, though he had been talking about the idea for about six years at that point. Instead, he talked about what he would see in the Beloved Community. That was the dream, equality and brotherhood between Black and white, creating true freedom and justice for all people.
“Beloved Community” isn’t King’s phrase, originally. It comes from 19th century philosopher Josiah Royce, and the concept was part of the discourse of nonviolence before King’s ministry began. But King made the idea well-known, even if we still struggle with defining a concept that has not been fully actualized.
Coretta Scott King was Martin Luther King Jr’s wife, a matriarch of a family of activists, and a powerful activist in her own right. This is how she defines Beloved Community in her memoir:
“To me, the Beloved Community is a realistic vision of an achievable society, one in which problems and conflicts exist but are resolved peacefully and without bitterness. In the Beloved Community, caring and compassion drive political policies that support the worldwide elimination of poverty and hunger and all forms of bigotry and violence. The Beloved Community is a state of heart and mind, a spirit of hope and goodwill that transcends all boundaries and barriers and embraces all creation. At its core, the Beloved Community is an engine of reconciliation. This way of living seems a long way from the kind of world we have now. Still, I believe we can accomplish this goal through courage, determination, education, and training if enough people are willing to make the necessary commitment.”
That’s the world I want to live in. That’s the dream. Right there. Not a utopia free from conflict but a society driven by compassion to support all people, free from bigotry and violence.
Don’t lose sight of the dream. It feels so far off sometimes, but I’m not dreaming of the world being just a little bit better. Sometimes we get incremental progress. Sometimes the forces of greed and apathy and objectification continue their assault on humanity, and it feels like we’re losing ground. We’re not struggling to win just that little bit of ground back. We’ve got our minds set on something better, nothing less than collective liberation, the flourishing of all people.
“With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” That’s how Dr. King said it. I’ve talked to some despairing people in the last week. Some of you are climbing that mountain of despair. King knew the despair of racial inequality that seemed insurmountable, but this dream, this faith, that our nation would be transformed, that all people would be free and equal.
The presidential inauguration tomorrow seems to represent the opposite. The forces of greed and objectification continue to use our nation’s antipathy for Black people and other people of color, for women, for trans and queer people, for disabled people, for immigrants, for poor people, use this collective disgust for the other to buy an election, to continue hoarding billions upon billions of dollars, to play chess with all of us as the pieces. Let us name the mountain of despair. Let us call it out and name the struggle. Let us call it greed. Let us call it objectification.
Let us call it an immoral force that would divide us from our neighbors and fellow citizens so that it can control us more easily.
It’s the same mountain of despair, 60-some years later.
It’s for us to chip away at it, however we can, to hew that stone of hope. Every bit you can chip away from despair, each bit of action that transforms the world to justice and freedom and love, that is a stone of hope.
You have a stone of hope to offer. It doesn’t need to be perfect or polished. Remember King leaving his prepared remarks behind to tell everyone about the dream. Your stone of hope, your dream, your vision of a better future, someone needs to hear it. Somebody you know needs to believe in something better than what we can see around us.
Hope is not a warm fuzzy feeling that we’re going to be okay. Hope is the conviction that we won’t stop working and believing toward that dream. Hope is when we ally ourselves with the Beloved Community. And that means every time you pick up trash so that it doesn’t go into the river, every time you share your wealth, every time you help a stranger, every time you get to know your neighbors, every time you speak out for justice, every time you spread trans and queer joy, every time you comfort a child who has fallen down, every time you hold the hand of a dying friend, every time you do these things and so many more, these are all acts of hope. In the face of greed and objectification, every act of love is an act of hope.
In this despairing world, we need your hope. Go tell them about the dream. We need to hold these dreams together. We need to transmit our hope to one another so that no one holds it alone.
Over 100 years ago, a mixed-race mine workers’ union sang a gospel song “We Will Overcome” at its meetings. Along the way, parts of the tune were swapped out with a spiritual you may know, “No More Auction Block for Me.” In the 1940s, striking tobacco industry workers, mostly Black women, began singing “We Will Overcome” at their meetings. The organizers at Highlander School, which has trained generations of civil rights activists, learned it from them. Pete Seeger changed it from We Will to We Shall Overcome. Dr. King heard Seeger sing the song in 1957. The song, as we know it, is deeply associated with the Highlander Center, which still trains civil rights activists, and with the labor and civil rights movements, holding and passing the hope through the generations.
We Shall Overcome is officially our anthem today. It’s my guess that some of us need to feel these words wash over us, and some of us need to feel them coming out of our own chests. The words will be on the screen. Sing or listen, as your heart needs this day, but as you do so I invite you to hold that stone from earlier in the service and connect to the threads of hope flowing between us.
Photo by Jimmy Woo on Unsplash