As we enter February, celebrated by many as Black History Month, it behooves us to remember that North Carolina, including eastern North Carolina, played an important role in the civil-rights movement.

The N.C. Department of Cultural Resources is telling that story by way of highway markers across the state.

Many people know of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech delivered in August 1963 in Washington, D.C.

Few people know that in November 1962 in Rocky Mount, King used a phrase about a dream. Near the end of that speech in Rocky Mount were these words:

“I have a dream that one day right here in Rocky Mount, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will meet at the table of brotherhood, knowing that one God brought man to the face of the Earth. I have a dream tonight that one day my little daughter and my two sons will grow up in a world not conscious of the color of their skin, but only conscious of the fact that they are members of the human race.”

May that dream live until it becomes reality.