Editorial: What is your dream?

When we think about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as we do on the January holiday that celebrates him each year, the words of his most famous speech are the ones that most easily come to mind.

“I have a dream,” he thundered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 in his charismatic preacher’s voice.

His dream was about a future for his children. It was about opportunity for his neighbors. It was about brotherhood, and it was about justice.

It was about how to take the contentious and precarious world of the 1960s — defined by struggles for equality and an overseas war — and believe in a brighter day. It might be hard to imagine how a Black man growing up in the Jim Crow-era South could hold that hope, but he did, and then did even more. He incubated it.

King’s speech became more than just a call to faith that one day there would be a fair world where there was no division by color or race. It was not just painting a portrait of a utopia. It was a call to action, urging Americans — not just Black Americans but all Americans — to work toward that possibility every day.

So what is your dream? What will you do to achieve it?

Do you hunger to move further down that road toward racial parity, equality and equity? Do you pray for the day Americans are not divided by economic barriers?

Do you believe the answers are in education? Are they the way we engage each other in politics and community?

Are these problems you see but despair of ever being solved? Do you lift your voice to change them? Do you throw up your hands in helplessness? Do you shrug your shoulders in apathy?

We cannot just hear King’s groundbreaking speech as a dream he had and a future he saw. To allow it to be just King’s vision is to fail to answer his challenge. To celebrate the day that celebrates him is to look around our world and do the work to create a more perfect union.

“I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream,” King said.

Let freedom ring.