Against a backdrop of political division and upheaval, Bernice King, the daughter of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., said the holiday honoring her father’s legacy offers a “somewhat of a saving grace” this year.
King said the MLK holiday “inserts a sense of sanity and morality into our very troubling climate right now,” adding that her father’s message is “hope and the ability to challenge injustice and inhumanity,” in an interview with The Associated Press.
King, the CEO of the King Center in Atlanta, spoke as President Donald Trump was about to mark the first anniversary of his second term on Tuesday. She said the “three evils” — poverty, racism and militarism — that King identified in a 1967 speech as threats to a democratic society were “very present and manifesting through a lot of what’s happening” under Trump’s leadership.
In particular, King cited efforts to roll back diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, directives she said aimed to scrub key parts of history from government websites, and steps she said included removing “improper ideology” from Smithsonian museums. She also pointed to immigration enforcement operations in multiple cities that she said turned violent and resulted in the separation of families.
A White House spokesperson, Davis Ingle, pushed back on those characterizations in an email. Ingle said, “Everything President Trump does is in the best interest of the American people,” and said that includes rolling back harmful DEI agendas, deporting dangerous criminal illegal aliens from American communities, and ensuring the administration is “being honest about our country’s great history.”
Maya Wiley, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said King’s remarks “ring more true today.” Wiley said there is “a regime actively working to erase the Civil Rights movement” and said the administration is “dismantling intentionally and with ideological fervor every advancement we have made since the Civil War.”
Wiley also recalled that King warned that “the prospect of war abroad was undermining to the beloved community globally” and that it was taking away the ability for people “to take care of all our people.” She pointed to what she said has included military strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats and a surprise raid in which Trump’s administration captured Venezuela’s president earlier this month.
King said she was not sure what her father would make of the United States today, nearly six decades after his assassination. “He’s not here. It’s a different world,” she said. She said, however, that his teachings “transcend time” and that he taught people “the way to address injustice through his nonviolent philosophy and methodology.”
King said nonviolence should be embraced not only by those protesting and fighting injustices, but also by immigration agents and other law enforcement officers. She said the King Center previously developed a curriculum to help officers carry out their duties while respecting people’s humanity, and that the center plans to redevelop it.
Even while describing the current period as troubling, King said there is “no question that “we have made so much progress as a nation.” She said the civil rights movement that her parents helped lead brought more people into mainstream politics with sensitivity and compassion, and she argued that, despite efforts to scrap DEI initiatives and deportations, “the inevitability is we’re so far into our diversity you can’t put that back in a box.”
To honor her father’s legacy this year, King urged people to look inward, saying: “I think we spend a lot of time looking at everybody else and what everybody else is not doing or doing, and we’re looking out the window at all the problems of the world and talking about how bad they are and we don’t spend a lot of time on ourselves personally.”
King endorsed participation in service projects to observe the holiday because, she said, they foster connection, sensitize people to the struggles of others and help people understand each other better. She also urged people to look at what they can do in the year to come to carry forward her father’s teachings, saying MLK Day can serve as “a measuring point from year to year in terms of what we’re doing to move our society in a more just, humane, equitable and peaceful way.”