Political Prisoner Joy Powell's Word of the Day:
Unfulfilled Dreams

January 18, 2024

Peace and Blessings, Family and Comrades.

I am very honored and grateful for the late great Martin Luther King Jr., who was born on January 15, 1929. I speak from the tombs of modern-day slavery where I have been held captive since 2007 because my conscience would not allow me to stay silent while watching my people be brutally murdered in my own community and across the U.S.

If you don’t have a voice or make noise you will never be heard. MLK Jr. once preached a message called unfulfilled dreams. He said that in the past our ancestors dreamed of the day they would escape the bosom of slavery and the long nights of injustice. You too may have a desire to make a change or do something that was in your heart to do. Or your tried, or you started it and intended to follow through on that desire for change.

Some started out building Temples of Justice, Temples of Peace, or even Temples of Character. So often we never get a chance to finish, being that life can be like an unfinished symphony.

We are still required to put forth the effort and put in the work. As the Bible says, some are tasked with planting, some with watering, and then God gives the increase. Trying to build constructively can be agonizing in our lives, where we are constantly trying to finish that which is seemingly unfinishable. You may have started something that in your own lifetime you will never see the complete change, because your task or mission was only to plant the vision.

Then in the next life of someone else, that unfulfilled dream will be watered, and then it will suddenly come to pass. MLK Jr. had a dream that one day there would be equality and justice for all.

With that being said, the honorable, charismatic MLK Jr. had a dream that the terror that America had subjected Black and Brown people to would end. This terror has been cruel and inhumane, based on the hate and miseducation that some were taught and continue to hand down to their progeny as if it were a birthright or rite of passage.

The same America that wages war and commits war crimes against innocent people also endorsed MLK Jr.’s assassination on April 4, 1968, one of the most horrifying public attacks on a freedom fighter for liberation of the Civil Rights Movement, because MLK Jr. followed his unfulfilled dreams and refused to allow racism, wrongful arrests and convictions, torturous beatings or terrorist genocidal attacks to deflect him from his vision.

Although some of MLK Jr.’s dreams have been fulfilled and his birthday is now celebrated, it was not because the oppressors in power really wanted to do it. People of all colors, creeds and religions forced U.S. President Ronald Reagan to sign the King Holiday Bill establishing MLK Jr. Day as a federal holiday in 1983.

It certainly was not because MLK Jr. was greatly loved for his commitment to being a voice for the voiceless. In fact, he was hated because he was perceived as a threat to the dominant society and the system of injustice they built to oppress, suppress and repress its own citizens, as well as countries and people outside U.S. borders.

Since April of 1968, there have been decades upon decades of long imprisonment sentences that other liberation fighters such as myself are still serving today.

What good is the First Amendment when you are framed, wrongfully convicted, or a victim of federal or state sanctions used by the same government that targeted MLK Jr. and many others?

The apostle Paul dreamed of going to Spain, but, as MLK Jr. said in his unfulfilled dreams speech, Paul ended up in prison in Rome.

The honorable MLK Jr. knew his dream would one day come to pass, but he also knew he would never live to see it, due to the racist agenda that ended with his martyrdom.

Yet, nothing has really changed, except that we are now allowed to associate with the same privileged class that was threatened by the truth and quest for justice in MLK Jr.’s unfulfilled dreams.

Rest in Power, MLK Jr.

Your sister in the struggle,
Rev. Joy Powell