It is a cruel irony that the nation will commemorate the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. on the day a man is sworn in as president who swears he'll roll back diversity efforts.
That Donald Trump is also promising to dispense even more tax breaks to the wealthiest, has appointed the least diverse and most questionably qualified slate of Cabinet officials in recent memory and has unapologetically accepted the embrace of white nationalists who proclaim him as a hero makes the day feel like a surreal collision on the calendar.
The fact that King’s commemoration and Donald Trump’s inauguration coincide feels both off brand and on point.
The fact that King’s commemoration and Trump’s inauguration coincide feels both off brand and on point in a country where the trains of progress and backlash have always moved on parallel tracks. But in this case, the backlash feels like it has the momentum of a bullet train. On the other hand, the effort to help marginalized or underrepresented people gain ground seems like it is struggling not to roll backward down a steep and craggy hill.
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Dr. King talked passionately about these parallel tracks in his lifetime, so we shouldn’t be surprised to find ourselves confronted with the same challenges in ours. In King’s era, church bombings, televised beatings and the notorious murders of civil rights workers and innocents like Emmett Till stirred a nation’s conscience around racial reconciliation. In ours, Covid disparities, family separations at the border and video of police violence against Black victims stoked an earnest conversation about equality in America.
Corporations suddenly committed to social justice issues pledged billions of dollars to help. But only a small fraction of the money pledged appears to have been spent, and many of those same businesses are now downsizing or devastating their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts because the incoming administration has essentially declared that DEI is DOA.
“Overwhelmingly America is still struggling with irresolution and contradictions,” King wrote in his 1967 book “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?”
“It has been sincere, and even ardent in welcoming some change,” he wrote. “But too quickly apathy and disinterest rise to the surface when the next logical steps are to be taken, laws are passed in a crisis mode after a Birmingham or a Selma, but no substantial fervor survives the formal signing of legislation. The recording of the law in itself is treated as the reality of the reform.”
I pick up my dog-eared, marked-up copy of “Where Do We Go From Here?,” King’s final book, every year around this time, and it always offers fresh lessons. This is the book in which King allowed himself to be angry on the page. The book in which lamented that integration alone wasn’t the end goal if white America treated Black Americans and other people of color with decency instead of true opportunity. In which King focused not just on racial reconciliation but on a broader human rights agenda that included fighting for the poor and for just wages for working-class Americans whose white modern-day counterparts overwhelmingly voted for Trump.
King focused on a broader human rights agenda that included fighting for just wages for working-class Americans whose modern-day counterparts overwhelmingly voted for Trump.
This book presents a Dr. King who was beginning to feel like America was turning a deaf ear to his pleas. He had won the Nobel Peace Prize but had begun to lose support and respect from younger and more radical Black leaders. And some white politicians who’d been allies (people such as President Lyndon B. Johnson) were beginning to disdain his opposition to America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Because this was the King who was pointing out that the stark equation of racial disparity seen in unemployment, infant mortality and income opportunities “pursues Negroes, even into war,” noting the disproportionately high casualty rate for Black soldiers in Vietnam.
The King the reader encounters in the book’s 200 pages is quite different from the man who has been portrayed since a federal holiday was established in his name. The holiday is now about as old as King was when he was assassinated on a balcony in Memphis. Two years before he was assassinated, a Gallup Poll found that 63% of Americans had negative views of King and an FBI memo declared that he was “the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation” because of his influence over “great masses of negroes.”
The widespread acceptance of King as a certified American hero has come with a softening of his image after he was caricatured as a dreamer instead of a doer and a soaring orator instead of a strategic and persistent agitator. He has been increasingly portrayed as someone who tried to appeal to the conscience of white Americans instead of someone who was increasingly pointing out white America’s hypocrisies and inconsistencies of effort.
As he wrote, “White America was ready to demand that the Negro should be spared the lash or brutality and coarse degradation, but it had never been truly committed to helping him out of poverty, exploitation, or all forms of discrimination.”
He wrote that “Negroes hold only one key to the double lock of peaceful change. The other is in the hands of the white community.”
He was a complex and evolving man who saw America’s limitations as well as its possibilities and often despaired that the chasm was so wide.
He was a complex and evolving man who saw America’s limitations as well as its possibilities and often despaired that the chasm was so wide.
And yet, his holiday is the day we get lectures about the content of our character from people who don’t fully support the ideas and policies of the man they selectively quote.
In the four decades our nation has been celebrating the King holiday, it feels that we have focused only on slim aspects of a much broader legacy. The shades have been drawn over windows in his life that could serve as a lighthouse in this moment of tumult and uncertainty.
And because we need that lighthouse right now, it might be useful to focus on his evolution toward dispelling hard truths despite the blowback. It might be smart to look back on the ways he tried to encourage people inside and outside the movement who felt like America would never live up to her promise and reminded people that a final victory wouldn’t come without constant setbacks.
“With a dynamic will, we must transform our minus into a plus, and move on aggressively through the storms of injustice, and the jostling winds of daily handicaps, toward the beginning lights of fulfillment. Our dilemma is serious and our handicaps are real. But equally real is the power of a creative will, and its ability to give us the courage to go on.”
This may provide neither balm nor inspiration for those who are dispirited by the direction of the country and the bizarre coincidence of the King holiday’s falling on the day a man who wants to be treated like a king is inaugurated.
I grew up surrounded by wise elders who chafed under the strictures of a racially unjust world that King gave his life trying to change. They figured out how to flourish despite the unrelenting headwinds of racial codes and outright discrimination, and their wisdom is ringing in my ears right now.
How many times did I hear some version of “There are no accidents, only lessons to be learned”?
Today's collision on the calendar feels like a call to action. A message wrapped up in a metaphor.
In that sense today’s collision on the calendar feels like a call to action. A message wrapped up in a metaphor. A reminder that the federal commemoration of Dr. King’s life isn’t merely a day off from work, school or toil but a day to press onward to the most important tasks before us.
That vision you have of a positive future? Speak of it. Write about it. Share your ideas about it. Run toward it.
Walk in the power of your imagination. Walk in the power of vision. Walk in the strength of your persistence and resilience. Practice and prioritize self-care. Rest if you must, and don’t apologize for temporarily tapping out. It’s not just OK. It’s necessary.
Let Dr. King’s encouragement for the people of past movements move us to acknowledge even the little victories on the way toward larger goals.
Do what you can to make America kind again and know that, as King told us decades ago, chaos and community are on the menu. Choose community.
