A nation without color bars or racial prejudice, a world regenerate and just, a land truly of the equal and the free: Martin Luther King, Jr, had a dream. He dreamed it for America, and on August 28, 1963, at the March on Washington, he shared it with America. The dream has a history. It was born of oppression; it was nurtured by vision and hope and rhetoric and fire. It was shaped in slave narratives, in letters, diaries, and memoirs, in essays, speeches, and poetry. In this volume it is explored, articulated, embraced, enlarged, defined, reviewed, and redefined in selections from the works of twenty-eight African-American writers whose lifetimes span two centuries.

The dream might offer hope in the face of despair. It might cry for justice or divine an apocalypse. For Maya Angelou when she was twelve or James Baldwin in his boyhood it might fuse a rich private inner life with a larger cultural reality. It might provide anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston or international stage star Paul Robeson with a vision of a world united. Translated into a call for action or a movement toward empowerment, it might prompt Frederick Douglass to redefine Reconstruction, Marcus Garvey to found the United Negro Improvement Association, Malcolm X to advocate black nationalism, W. E. B. Du Bois to espouse Pan Africanism. A dream took Alex Haley on a nine-year quest for his family's roots and in the heart of Africa a griot redeemed his people from historical anonymity. It took a fifteen year old black boy named Richard Wright on a train ride north to a mythic Promised Land otherwise known as Chicago.

Among other African Americans included in We Have a Dream are Mary McLeod Bethune, Claude Brown, Shirley Chisholm, James Farmer, bell hooks, Langston Hughes, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Bayard Rustin, Alice Walker, and Booker T. Washington. Because of them, and countless more like them, the African-American dream has a future.