DeMerris Johnson and Carl Alleyne performed a duet, "The Dream Realized," inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "A Knock at Midnight" speech, given in 1967. The song was written in collaboration with Tony Martin and The Elements, disciples from Columbia, South Carolina, to express the thoughts and feelings of Dr. King as he grappled with whether to abandon the civil rights movement in the back drop of a parade of threats on his life and family members. In 2008 when Dr. Alveda King, niece to MLK, heard a recording of "The Dream Realized," she offered her enthusiastic endorsement; and said, "...the lyrics are compelling, the melody is moving ..." The crowd was in fact moved to their to feet on Sunday when DeMerris and Carl performed this as a duet. The audience, made up of blacks, whites and other races all sung with convictions the age-old anthem, "We Shall Overcome."Not only was King's life threatened and ultimately assassinated, some of the other threats on the King family included the bombing of Reverend AD King's (brother to MLK) home in May of 1963. I was fortunate to be with Mrs. King last May, 2014, when she addressed an audience in Birmingham, Alabama and recounted her memories of the bombing that would destroy the front of the house she and her husband lived in while he was the pastor of First Baptist. She said she was preparing for Mother's Day when the first bomb went off. She didn't hear anything and only saw that her living room window had begun to crack.
"I didn't know what was going on," she said. "It happened that God brought my husband up to the front door of the parsonage. He opened the door and he looked up and down the street and it was [so] quiet that you could hear a piece of cotton that fell on the carpet."
Alarmed by the silence, King tried to get his family out of the house as the second bomb went off. No one in the home was harmed.
"The moral of this whole story is that when you keep God first in all that you say and do he will never ever leave or forsake you," she said.
The King family have made many sacrifices in the community, the government, the streets, and most importantly, the church. The King family are a cornerstone in the African-American community. The result of MLK's dream and sacrifice has witnessed the two elections of our nation's first African American president.
On Sunday, while we celebrated and commemorated the many contributions of Dr. King and his family, I believe he would have been pleased to see a multicultural, multi-generational congregation, worshipping together. It gave us all cause for pause, to reflect on his words: "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 straight and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together. 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 together at the table of brotherhood."
The assembly of blacks and whites worshipping together in the birthplace of the civil rights movement is the realization of a dream come true, as expressed by Teresa Alleyne, a member of the Boston Church of Christ's Southern Region, last Sunday. It gives me hope that one day, "We shall overcome" racism, bigotry, hatred and division and come together as one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. We shall overcome!