On Monday we’re celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day and inaugurating Donald Trump as the 47th president of the United States. That may seem like an odd pairing, especially to those of us who believe Mr. Trump has fueled a culture of skepticism, denial and indifference to matters of injustice.
But if Dr. King’s life taught us anything, it is that hope is most useful when the evidence runs the other way toward despair. Set against dark times, hope points us toward something better.
Dr. King’s ministry took place in a country marked by segregation, an unpopular war abroad and the widespread social and economic disenfranchisement of African Americans.
This is not 1963. But the troubled times many of us feel we are in make Dr. King’s message especially relevant.
The occasion of his “I Have a Dream” speech, the 1963 March on Washington, came in the wake of a long season of anti-Black violence. In May of that year protests against racial segregation in Birmingham, Ala., which came to be known as the Children’s Crusade, had been met with fire hoses, police dogs and batons. That same month saw an angry mob assault the sit-in that took place at a Woolworth’s in Jackson, Miss. In June, the civil rights activist Medgar Evers was murdered outside his home, also in Jackson.
When Dr. King imagined in his speech that someday “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will sit down together at the table of brotherhood,” that dream served as an alternative to the bloody and dispiriting reality of the present.
Dr. King didn’t run from this evil or deny its reality, but he also did not let despondency have the final word. “I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history,” he said during his 1964 acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize. “I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsam and jetsam in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.”
He looked at the stark reality of his present and dared to defy it.
Dr. King was buoyed by a vision of peace between God and humanity outlined by the Hebrew prophets in the Bible. The hope he turned to was first forged in the Black church tradition of his youth. That tradition often had to rely upon divine assistance because it did not have political or economic power.
In that same Nobel Prize speech he said, “I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive good will proclaim the rule of the land.”
Our troubles now in the United States are not the product of one election. The past decade or so of American life has seen an unending parade of mass shootings, racially motivated violence, economic instability and wars in Israel, Gaza and Ukraine where innocent civilians have suffered.
Speaking about the problems is not the hard part. Much more difficult is to find the strength to believe there is a hope beyond our jeremiads. Despair has never liberated anybody.
I am still inspired by Dr. King’s witness, but I do not believe that we can be content with borrowing his dream. It’s not enough for someone sitting in the rubble of 1963 to outline a vision that helped create the more just world we inhabit. We need someone who picked his or her way through the partial ruin of recent years to deliver a fresh word.
We need more people with the courage to say that we do not have to see the foreigner as a threat but instead as a fellow bearer of the image of God. To see the struggles in our cities for what they are, not as a means of changing the subject. And to recognize that rural America is more than a place where resentments and votes can be whipped up — it needs revitalization.
We can’t push suffering onto others without it returning to us. Our world is interconnected whether we want to acknowledge it or not. We can’t build walls high enough to blot out the world’s problems, but we can extend our hands far enough to make a difference in the lives of those who are hurting.
Dr. King is a model through his very act of hoping. That is his great gift to us. We honor him well if we remember that the third Monday in January is still for the dreamers.
