'Dreams' deferred: Hearing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 

"Went up on the mountain / To see what I could see." — The Allman Brothers, "Dreams"

When I was a kid growing up in Asheboro, about an hour and a half northeast of Charlotte, I fell deeply and passionately in love with the Allman Brothers Band. In my book, Dixie Lullaby: A Story of Music, Race and New Beginnings in a New South, I describe how and why I — a young white Southerner coming of age in the early '70s — came to identify with the band:

The Allmans dressed in flannels and jeans, like I did. The singer, Gregg Allman, crooned with a melancholy I'd never before heard from someone who shared my reality. It was as though he were speaking directly to me. In the band's 1969 psychedelic-gospel dirge "Dreams," Allman moaned the words "I went up on the mountain / To see what I could see / The whole world was falling / Right down in front of me." I was only eleven years old the first time I heard that song, but I felt I knew what Gregg Allman was talking about. In the years following desegregation, the mood of the South was chaotic. Times were changing. Wrong seemed right and right seemed wrong. The Allmans embraced that chaos, combining country, blues, jazz, and gospel into an otherworldly musical stew that allowed me to feel conflicting emotions: sadness, joy, sorrow, pride. Between 1969 and 1973, the Allmans sang of what it felt like to be saddled with pain ("Dreams," "It's Not My Cross to Bear"); they sang of redemption ("Revival"); and they sang of falling in love with (and within) the awesome beauty of the rural South ("Blue Sky," "Southbound").

What I didn't say in that paragraph is that I often would lie back on my bed, staring at the ceiling, and listen to the Allmans' "Dreams" over and over and over. Each time it ended, I'd get up and put the needle back at the beginning of the track. I was obsessed with the uncomfortable longing for something that's never clearly stated in the lyrics. "Dreams" had everything I looked to music for: a deep and mournful melody, passionate improvisation, expressions of hurt that don't come with easy solutions like "Let It Be" or "All You Need is Love," two Beatles songs from the same period. Gregg Allman expressed a hunger for dreams he'd never see. Never. That, to me, was big.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. also spoke of dreams he'd never see. And this week, as we celebrate King's birthday, his life and his legacy, the Allmans' "Dreams" remains as powerful and relevant to me as it did when I was that little boy in Asheboro.

When we think of Dr. King's "dream" today, do we think only of the dazzling speech he made on the Washington mall about those "little black boys and black girls" in Alabama joining hands with "little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers"? Or do we also think about his other dreams — the more complex dreams that we haven't yet seen?

King also dreamed an America that doesn't threaten other countries with its military might. He dreamed of a United States that's more about compassion than arrogance, more about reality than delusion. Those dreams are the exact opposite of the rhetoric we've heard for more than a decade now from local and national personalities ranging from Mecklenburg County Commissioner Bill James to former Charlotte mayor and current U.S. Rep. Sue Myrick, from ex-President George W. Bush to deranged TV talking head Glenn Beck, from GOP presidential wannabe Rick Santorum to GOP presidential wannabe Rick Perry. The words of those fundamentalist leaders come off more like the rantings of an Osama bin Laden than the measured wisdom of a Martin Luther King Jr.

"Don't let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world," King once warned. "God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, 'You are too arrogant, and if you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power...'"

At the risk of diminishing the great strides the country has made in the 40-plus years since King was gunned down in Memphis, I believe our city, state and nation are nowhere near achieving his dreams. And for any of us to sit back and bask in the accomplishments while downplaying the very real problems we still face with regard to intolerance in our nation is to disrespect King's legacy.

The specter of racially motivated hate is everywhere today. It's in the faces of those hordes of citizens whose anger over the nation's first black president is so intense that it can't be chalked up to mere political differences. It's in the voices of those whose rage at Spanish-speaking brown people in the U.S. is so intense that it can't be explained away as just opposition to so-called illegal immigration. It's in the actions of those whose animosity over a mosque in New York City is so intense that it can't be just concern for national security.

What is national security anyway? Is it an America where everyone looks alike and thinks and believes the same things? Or is it an America that values diversity and cultural understanding? Say what you will, cover it up with whatever veil you choose, but the venom we see every single day in this city and nation is nothing short of racism and xenophobia. And this must stop or it will kill us all.

Some people don't want to hear words like racism and xenophobia. Some say those words are overused. Some feel that we should choose less "loaded" words to describe the toxic vitriol we see and hear on TV and in the comments sections of websites such as CL's and The Charlotte Observer's. Of course, some of us also don't much like looking into mirrors, because we fear we've grown too fat or too old. Mirrors tell the truth.

Toward the end of "Dreams," Gregg Allman wails, "Ah, help me, baby, or this will surely be the end of me." Then he becomes calm again, his warm organ swells accompanying newfound courage in the lyrics: "Pull myself together, put on a new face. / Climb down off the hilltop, get back in the race."

That's what Martin Luther King Jr. taught us: persistence, courage, optimism. We can't survive without them.

(A slightly different version of this column appeared last year on the music website Option-magazine.com.)