This is an opinion column.

I recently met an older white gentleman at a luncheon. We sat next to each other and engaged in cordial banter before the program began. He told me Birmingham had been his home “for 72 years.”

I love listening to those who’ve walked this earth longer than me. I was taught to respect them, to hear them. To be enlightened by their journey, by what they’ve seen. By what they’ve learned.

Our topics varied and swerved until we reached the state of today’s world. Specifically, the state of our leaders today. Or so-called such. “Why is there no one around,” he began, “who’s trying to pull us all together?”

I paused, my mind veering this way and that, pondering pull us all together. Trying to discern what it meant. To him.

I asked, “Like who?” Genuinely curious, I was. Not really knowing whose name, or names might emerge from this older white gentleman who’s made Alabama his home for longer than I’ve been on this earth.

“Dr. Martin Luther King and Gandhi,” he said.

I don’t disagree with either. Although it’s intriguing that King, who was seen by so many during his lifetime as a disruptor, an antagonist, even by some as a Communist—particularly in the South—is now perceived by at least one older white gentleman from Alabama as someone who pulled us all together.

As for someone like those men today? Couldn’t think of anyone off the top of my head.

Before writing this column, I re-re-re read “I Have a Dream”. (I urged you to do so, too.) King made hundreds of speeches, of course, before he was felled by an assassin bullet in Memphis on April 4, 1968. Yet this is The One. The one that encapsulates his copious words, thoughts, and deeds. The one certainly most recognized and quoted (often erroneously or annoyingly out of context, as my colleague John Archibald noted).

The one every schoolchild in America should study. Every one of them.

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Delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at the crescendo of the most impactful protest of our lifetime—a protest that pulled most of us together—the “Dream” speech was the pinnacle of King’s oratory journey. It epitomized the disruptive movement to end legal segregation and create a nation where men, women, and children of all races possessed an equal opportunity to succeed.

Or fail.

King, and those he led, succeeded in some areas, failed in others. Legal segregation was outlawed almost six decades ago. Yet he was, of course, murdered by those who feared his dream—the one that pulled us together-as he pivoted towards a new one: tackling poverty and its unforgiving repercussions for too many Americans, of all races.

“Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice,” he charged that day.

Yet today, almost six decades after legal segregation ended, King would likely still be dreaming—because we remain, it sometimes seems, as segregated as ever.

“The life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination [and] the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.”

We’re largely geographically segregated (If er’body in your ‘hood knows the one or two families of color around the way, that’s not integrated) while too many Black, brown (and white) families still dwell on that lonely island of poverty.

We’re segregated psycho-graphically, too. In recent years, our different ways of thinking, our varied perspectives, were weaponized by some as much as skin color was in a nation King tried to pull towards his dream.

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Yet on that day nearly 60 years ago, King implored us to “not wallow in the valley of despair” and to “forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline.”

So today, though we may be weary of dreaming, we should all still dream.

Dream that our recent divisiveness is dissipating.

Dream that our disparate thoughts and perspectives are foundations for discussion, not dismissiveness.

Dream all God’s children will be educated with the whole truth and not cocooned by their parents’ fear and ignorance.

I dream that we all (or most of us) wake up and do what we cannot expect one or two people to do anymore—pull us together. And do it with, and these were King’s words that day, too, “the fierce urgency of now”.

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