Editorial: What would MLK Jr. do? What, now, will we do?

By The Herald Editorial Board

There may not be a more fitting example of the nation’s current political and societal divisions than in how Americans will choose to spend their time on Monday.

Some will celebrate the second presidential inauguration of Donald Trump, either from the comfort of their homes or in Washington, D.C., where forecasts of temperatures in the low-20s and high winds have moved ceremonies indoors.

Others, will mark Martin Luther King Jr. Day at rallies, marches and with a day of volunteer service to honor the slain civil rights leader on the 42nd anniversary of the federal holiday, and the 56 years since his assassination.

(Still others will be in front of screens for the NCAA’s football championship game that evening.)

And, yes, a few will observe both the inauguration and the holiday, seeing no contradiction in respecting both solemn occasions as celebrations of the American experience.

You can ask yourself where you stand on that spectrum. At risk of speculation, we can also ask: What would Martin do?

There’s an arrogance in the thinking that anyone can know how a historical figure might view current situations, seeking to add to their own arguments the popular respect held for the Founders, long-dead presidents and great thinkers and leaders — including MLK.

King’s memory and words are heavily trod territory, often borrowed in serving assumptions regarding where he would stand on one issue or the other.

Journalist and King biographer Jonathan Eig, who won the Pulitzer Prize for biography last year for “King: A Life,” recently wrote a commentary for The Washington Post that criticized the tendency to quote King out of context, watering down and omitting his words in service of assertions that contradict his life’s work, to the point of turning King’s “I Have a Dream” speech against his “radical” campaign opposing racism, inequality and injustice.

Writes Eig: “That ‘content of their character’ quote — taken from King’s famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech — has proved to be one of the most dangerous weapons in the effort to airbrush his legacy. It is used widely to suggest that King wished for a color-blind society — that he would have opposed affirmative action, for example — and that all he ever stood for was peace, harmony and coalition-building.”

Eig continues that in an essay published after his death, King criticized white America for its “ingrained and tenacious racism.”

“Even in his ‘Dream’ speech,” Eig continues. “before he mentioned ‘content of their character,’ he talked about racial segregation, the lasting social and economic impact of slavery, and the Black victims of police brutality. To come away from that speech thinking King called for a color-blind society requires willful distortion, which is exactly what we have seen.”

What, now, would Martin do?

Trump’s supporters believe it only fair that — his voters having given him a plurality of the popular vote along with a majority of the Electoral College in November — he is now empowered to lead the nation for the next four years and has been given a Republican-led House and Senate to carry out his policies, at least for the next two years. Trump and supporters can now make their case for those policies and have the voter-approved majorities to adopt them.

All that is correct and proper.

(Never mind that Trump and his more misguided supporters balked at the peaceful transition of power — also mandated by both popular vote and Electoral College in 2020 — with a violent storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.)

It’s also correct and proper that there are those with legitimate concerns and reasoned opposition to much of what Trump and a Republican Congress wish to carry out and who also are empowered over the next four years to use the legal means allowed them to fight those proposals and prevent their passage and imposition.

King is often credited with the words: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Those words, along with other historical quotes, were woven around the border of a rug that decorated the Oval Office during President Obama’s tenure.

The meaning, if not the phrasing, were coined by a 19th-century abolitionist and Unitarian minister, Theodore Parker, and employed by King to sustain his hopes for his “beloved community,” even in periods of darkness.

That “beloved community” — also a phrase King borrowed, crediting another 19th-century religious philosopher — was meant to embrace the community within and outside the walls of the church, as explained by Baptist minister and theologian Jason Oliver Evans in a commentary for The Conversation, published in The Herald.

Evans cites scholars who hold that the well-being of King’s “beloved community” guided his struggle against what he called the “three evils of American society”: racism, economic exploitation and militarism.

“For King, therefore, the beloved community was not merely a utopian vision of the future,” Evans writes. “He envisioned it as an obtainable ethical goal that all human beings must work collectively toward achieving.”

Evans then quotes a 1966 King essay:

“Only a refusal to hate or kill can put an end to the chain of violence in the world and lead us toward a community where men can live together without fear. Our goal is to create a beloved community and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives.”

Mark Monday as you see fit in honoring the American experience, but perhaps with King’s “beloved community” in mind.

What, now, will we do?