Despite nearly four decades of commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a federal holiday, the United States hasn’t completely embraced and applied the lessons learned from the dead civil rights activist, according to his youngest daughter.
The Reverend Bernice King, who is the director of The King Centre in Atlanta, claimed that authorities, particularly politicians, frequently devalue her father’s legacy by transforming him into a “comfortable and convenient King” who offers simple pleasantries.
- Advertisement -
She said at the memorial ceremony at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where her father had served as a pastor, “We love to quote King in and around the holiday. … But then we refuse to live King 365 days of the year.”
The annual ceremony at Ebenezer, sponsored by the center, was the highlight of the 38th federal King holiday celebrations. King would have turned 94 on Sunday. He was assassinated in Memphis in 1968 while fighting for better pay and working conditions for the city’s sanitation workers.
Bernice King lamented institutional and individual racism, economic and health care injustices, police violence, a militarized international order, rigid immigration procedures, and the climate disaster in her voice that rose and fell in cadences reminiscent of her father’s. She expressed how, ” “exhausted, exasperated and, frankly, disappointed” at hearing her father’s words about justice being referenced so frequently and seeing “so little progress” being made in solving the most serious issues facing society.
Bernice King noted, “he was God’s prophet sent to this nation and even the world to guide us and forewarn us. … A prophetic word calls for an inconvenience because it challenges us to change our hearts, our minds and our behavior.” He continued, “Dr. King, the inconvenient King, puts some demands on us to change our ways.”
On Monday, President Joe Biden was slated to speak at an MLK brunch in Washington, DC, that was organized by the National Action Network of the Reverend Al Sharpton. As the youth director of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s anti-poverty initiative, while he was in his teens, Sharpton began his career as a civil rights activist.
The senior pastor of Ebenezer, Senator Raphael Warnock, who was just re-elected to a full term as Georgia’s first Black US senator, invited Biden to give a lecture at Ebenezer on Sunday. Biden repeated themes from that address, saying that, “this is a time for choosing.”
“Will we choose democracy over autocracy or community over chaos? Love over hate?” Biden questioned. “These are the questions of our time that I ran for president to try to help answer. … Dr. King’s life and legacy — in my view — shows the way forward.”
Other commemorations repeated Bernice King’s warning and Vice President Biden’s references that the “Beloved Community,” which was Martin Luther King’s term for a society devoid of fear, bigotry, hunger, and violence, is still unattainable.
Mayor Michelle Wu of Boston spoke about the need to stand up for the truth in a time of extreme partisanship and disinformation.
“We’re battling not just two sides or left or right and a gradient in between that have to somehow come to compromise, but a growing movement of hate, abuse, extremism and white supremacy fueled by misinformation, fueled by conspiracy theories that are taking root at every level,” she expressed.
Education restores trust, according to Wu, Boston’s first female and minority mayor. She cited King while urging for action to be taken in order to get above the “fatigue of despair.” Wu said to the audience at a memorial luncheon, “There are times when we feel most worn out and most hopeless that we are just about to break through.
A “day of service” dedicated to preventing gun violence was organized by volunteers in Philadelphia. The city has experienced a spike in killings, with 516 deaths in 2017 and 562 the year before, the highest number in at least six decades.
Some volunteers worked to put together gun safety kits for public distribution as part of the effort’s centerpiece project, which was directed by the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. According to the organizers, the kits come with “gun cable locks and additional safety devices for childproofing,” They also provide details on how to store firearms, social and health assistance, and how to cope after gun violence.
Other kits being put together included the “Fighting Chance” program of Temple University Hospital and contained supplies to provide quick assistance to victims at the site of gunshots, according to the organizers. They said that recipients will receive training on how to utilize the supplies, which include tourniquets, gauze, chest seals, and other tools for treating serious wounds.
Residents of Selma, Alabama, a crucial location in the civil rights fight, remembered King as they recovered from a terrible storm system that passed through the South last week.
When Alabama state police assaulted and battered demonstrators on “Bloody Sunday” in March 1965, King was not present at Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed by Congress and signed by President Lyndon Johnson as a result of efforts that he joined later in a procession that successfully crossed the bridge leading to the Capitol in Montgomery.
The storm on Thursday had little effect on the Pettus Bridge.
Monday, the first Black House speaker in Maine asked citizens to participate in charitable deeds in King’s memory.
Talbot Ross, a former president of the Portland NAACP and the daughter of Maine’s first black congressman noted in a statement, ” His unshakable faith, powerful nonviolent activism and his vision for peace and justice in our world altered the course of history.”
“We must follow his example of leading with light and love and recommit ourselves to building a more compassionate, just and equal community,” she remarked.
Warnock, who has been the pastor of Ebenezer for 17 years, praised his predecessor’s accomplishments in gaining voting rights for Black Americans. However, like Bernice King, the senator cautioned against having a narrow perspective on King.
“Don’t just call him a civil rights leader. He was a faith leader,” Warnock stated. “Faith was the foundation upon which he did everything he did. You don’t face down dogs and water hoses because you read Nietzsche or Niebuhr. You gotta tap into that thing, that God he said he met anew in Montgomery when someone threatened to bomb his house and kill his wife and his new child.”
King, Warnock shared, “left the comfort of a filter that made the whole world his parish,” turning faith into “the creative weapon of love and nonviolence.”
Warnock acknowledged certain advancements throughout his life while reiterating Bernice King’s plea for more daring public policy. Warnock, who has run for the Senate twice, pointed out that he was born at a time when both Georgia senators were ardent supporters of segregation, including one who loved “the Negro” as long as he was “in his place at the back door.”
Then again, Warnock said, “Because of what Dr. King and because of what you did … I now sit in his seat.”
