As we lay our heads on our pillows at night fast asleep – are we dreaming? As we sit in daylight with a blank stare gazing out the window - are we dreaming? And if so what are we dreaming about. Good Morning, my name is Shelton Redden and like many of you, other people feel that it is these dreams that give us life; and without dreams our waken state is tantamount to death. Langston Hughes in a poem entitled “Dreams” portrays this very point; [he writes:]
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
Langston Hughes compared what life would be like without dreams; where others have equated life with dreams. In an excerpt from the transcript of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech on civil rights delivered at the Lincoln Monument in 1963, [Dr. King states and I quote:]
Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. I say to you today my friends – so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today.
It would appear that Dr. King’s