How does Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. impact your leadership?  How can businesses, schools, and individuals seek to embody his dream today? 

These were two questions asked during a fireside chat at a breakfast I attended this morning.  Two local African American leaders/business owners were asked to respond.  From their responses, I don't believe that either of them were raised in Sacramento.  Interestingly, I found my own experiences fell between theirs.  As a person who came from a poor single-parent household, yet, who did have the privilege of having a mother who'd grown up in the north (Detroit, Michigan) attending all White schools and was the great-granddaughter of an educator, I had the advantage of knowing how to navigate predominately white environments and feel at home in them.  

 As we consider The Dream and how we are still working to achieve it in all aspects of our society, we need to consider a variety of voices and experiences of people to answer these questions because as the new movie American Fiction demonstrates, the Black experience, like any other human experience, is multifaceted.  When we can begin to wrestle with and be okay with the complexity of this fact, we can begin to build the kind of lasting coalitions that can create the reality that so many of us desperately desire.