MLK Day 2025

Am I the only one who’s noticed? That’s hard to believe, but I haven’t seen any comment. This year MLK Day coincides with the second inauguration of the greatest personal threat to American democracy since the Civil War.

What irony!

But for me, it will be a solace. I will have something real and enduring to celebrate Monday. When the inauguration ceremonies are over and the grounds lie empty on what promises to be a bitterly cold day, I will raise a glass of something non-alcoholic and recall one of the greatest Americans never to have held political office.

Ironies abound. Pollsters tell us that Evangelicals were instrumental in electing Trump president a second time. They call themselves “Christians.” But as they viciously prod our social divisions like open wounds, they seem a bit light in Jesus’ virtues.

“Love thy enemy,” Jesus said. “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” “Turn the other cheek.” Although not a believer in the pedestrian sense, I have described these words of Jesus as the greatest bumper stickers ever penned, composed two millennia before there were cars.

Dr. King, it seems to me, followed Jesus’ prescriptions more faithfully and more effectively than any American pol in our nation’s history, our estimable Founders included. In how many peaceful protests did he “turn the other cheek”? How often did he let bigots and barbarians bloody himself and his followers, just to show that love and forbearance are the glue that binds our species together and our ultimate salvation?

The parallels don’t stop there. Herod crucified Jesus for being a politically inconvenient leader of a tiny tribe (Jews) on the edge of the great Roman Empire. MLK was killed for being a politically inconvenient leader of a marginalized tribe of oppressed Black people on the political, if not geographic, edge of the greatest democracy since Rome.

The only salient difference was that the Roman state murdered Jesus, while a private assassin killed MLK. But how great a difference was that when our State, in the person of J. Edgar Hoover (and others), had persecuted and defamed MLK relentlessly for decades, merely for wanting to make the words of our Declaration and Constitution real?

Still the parallels don’t stop. Today we don’t see Jesus or MLK as philosophers or thinkers. We think of them as activists. They made their impact not with words on paper, but with social deeds. They organized. They persuaded. They preached. They drew crowds and followers. They changed minds with their powerful and extraordinary ideas. And they drew authorities’ attention and ire because their deeds caused unwanted and misunderstood social change and promised more.

Yet today we have a signal advantage over Jesus’ early followers. We have the speeches and thoughts of MLK on tape. We don’t have to depend on the interpretations and “spin” of followers who purportedly recorded his words and deeds decades or centuries later. We can read and hear for ourselves.

On Monday, I will do just that. I will sit down before my computer and listen to MLK deliver what I see as his most important speech. (No, it’s not his “I have a dream!” speech, although that, too, was a masterpiece of human love, emotional logic, and gentle persuasion.) I will hear him deliver his speech of April 4, 1967, in which, for the first time, he broke with LBJ on the escalation of our tragic debacle in Vietnam.

In that speech, as I have written before, he laid out in detail—and with astonishing accuracy—the future consequences of our stubborn and illogical persistence in that misguided war. In so doing, he proved to be a “seer” as much as if he had been divine.

I will marvel again at MLK’s brilliance and foresight. I will hear and feel the strong but gentle timber of his resonant voice and the universal love it expresses. I will rejoice that such a man once walked the Earth, even while I was on it and could see and hear him, if only remotely. And I will know for certain that, if our species survives, we will remember MLK—like Jesus, Mandela and Gandhi—for millennia, even as the Demagogue’s name fades from memory like those of the warring chiefs of medieval Italian city-states in Machiavelli’s The Prince.



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