Today, August 28, 2013, marks the 50th anniversary of the historic ‘March on Washington’ during which Martin Luther King delivered his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech. The Drum Major gave voice to a vision that resonated immediately across the globe; and its impact still reaches across the decades to offer today’s generations guidance. The implications of that historic march and that inspired speech offer some insights for us in Bermuda as we address our fraying social fabric and work to restore our community.Understanding the context of historic events is vital in drawing any lessons. A few months earlier, in the first week of May 1963, the civil rights movement reached a watershed in Birmingham, Alabama. The seven years that followed the earlier success of the bus boycott in Montgomery, had led to only limited progress, in spite of the grim toll taken. In Birmingham that May, Sheriff Bull Connor used an iron fist to stem the tide towards freedom.William Moore had staged a one-man ‘freedom march’ across the South to Birmingham and was shot and killed. This sparked a protest in Birmingham on May 2, 1963, in which hundreds of high school students – but some as young as seven- began voluntarily walking into to the City Jail. By the end of that day there were 1,000 children cramming into the cells. In order to stop the success of the campaign Bull Connor ordered the use of water cannon and K-9 units to block any children gaining access to the area. The melee that followed led to youngsters being swept down the streets with torrents of water. The picture in the New York Times the next day, of a policeman holding a teenager with one hand and allowing a dog to bit into the abdomen of the young man with the other, shocked the conscience of the nation.President Kennedy was moved by the reports and sent special envoys to Birmingham to attempt to mediate between the parties. King had given himself over to imprisonment as added leverage, but the local government released him immediately. It was an initiative coordinated by MLK and Robert Kennedy to raise funds to bail out the 2,500 students, which served as a face-saver to the sides in this impasse.The energy generated by that direct action on the part of those hundreds of brave young people, led to a discussion about moving the Civil Rights Movement to another level. The conversation amongst the leading activist settled on a “March on Washington” to bring things together. While the Kennedy administration and some conservative leaders initially opposed it, King led the majority who settled on taking their sustained grassroots campaign to the US capital.The internal politics involved and the context of the era meant that there were no women among the speakers and the only young person permitted to speak was the 23-year-old John Lewis – now a senior member of the US Congress - who had earned this honour by a record of numerous imprisonments as a student leader. Of course it was King’s speech that defined that moment in history.The written draft of his speech contained no reference to ‘the Dream’ and the circumstances of the movement might have best been described as a ‘nightmare’. MLK could have yielded to the temptation and used his speech to complain about the intransigence of the status quo. It would have been deemed understandable if he had simply focused on the absurdity of Bull Connor’s actions against the 2,500 children who filled Birmingham’s jails that time in May 1963.However, overcoming temptation and seizing the moment, moving beyond the script, Dr King challenged the imaginations of those quarter of million people on the Mall in Washington. He spoke of a dream of what could be, rather than dwelling on the challenges they had experienced. In the face of that crisis, King was giving voice to a vision, calling on people of conscience to make it happen.Marcus Garvey noted that ‘people without vision are like a tree without roots’. Our local Progressive Group had a vision and acted to transform our Island.As we reflect on this 50th anniversary, we are offered something today. As we face challenges to the fabric of our own community – such as the recent return to violence - we can resist the temptation to complain and act as victims. If we draw on the example of Martin Luther King, the courage of those children and the others of all backgrounds who constituted that movement, we would do well to dream. Local residents from every sector might use our imaginations to create the sort of Bermuda, we all wish to see, as we move into this new Millennium.