- November 19, 2024
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Miles Jackson, 11, had prepared for a year to recite the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s "I Have a Dream" speech, and Sunday morning, the words of the slain civil rights leader rang out before a packed church in Palm Coast in the boy’s voice.
Jackson said it meant a lot to him to be able to recite a speech that had changed history.
“It was amazing to do a speech that had meant a lot to a lot of people,” he said. “It was like a pathway into the past.”
Jackson, a student at Palm Harbor Academy, recited the speech at the First AME Church in Palm Coast before the Rev. Gillard Glover spoke to congregants about King, comparing the leader’s dream to those of Prophet Joseph, and calling it one that must be fought for generation to generation.
“Like Joseph, Martin cast a dream of a rightly ordered society in which all persons are given an opportunity to realize their God-given potentialities,” Glover said in a service punctuated by choir performances of songs like “We Shall Overcome.”
“Dreams must be kept alive from generation to generation, they must be passed on from generation to generation,” Glover said. “But dream keeping is the job of a community.”
Glover compared King’s hardships and imprisonment to the false imprisonment of Joseph, saying both visionaries received the wrath of the people because they challenged the status quo of their societies, but then passed on their dreams to the very communities they had suffered in.
Jesus, Glover said, was the ultimate “dream caster,” and the epitome of sacrifice for an equitable society.
Glover called King's message a reiteration of Christian teaching, of a dream that began not with King but with God, and was passed on through the prophets, Christ, and the Christian church.
“Jesus passed the dream on to a community we know as the church,” and the disciples, he said, “and they made the church in the west dream keepers; they made the church in the east dream keepers; they made you dream keepers, and they made me a dream keeper. They made you and I keepers of the dream of a rightly ordered society — in which people are not judged by the color of the skin, but by the content of their character.”
The First AME Church of Palm Coast is located at 91 Old Kings Road N. For more information, call 446-5759 or visit firstchurchofpalmcoast.org
