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The Trumpian challenge to Dr. King's legacy of non-violence... [1]

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Date: 2025-01-20

Since the Martin Luther King Federal Holiday was enacted in 1986, today’s inauguration is the third time the two events have shared the day. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were inaugurated in their second terms on the day. The next time it is scheduled to occur will be in 2053— if we are still holding free and fair elections at that time. The concurrence can be viewed in symbolic terms. Bill Clinton was famously named “the first Black president” in a 1998 article by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison in The New Yorker. Morrison pointed to Clinton's background as the child raised by a single parent “born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas...” stating that, figuratively, Clinton’s early life closely mirrored the lived- experience of Blacks in America.

The second half of her comment, however, is more revealing of Morrison’s pointed reference to the trying circumstances that follow those born in poverty:

“And when virtually all the African-American Clinton appointees began, one by one, to disappear, when the President’s body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution, when he was metaphorically seized and body-searched, who could gainsay these black men who knew whereof they spoke?” — Toni Morrison

Obama, of course, was the real “first Black president” and his second inauguration in 2013 took on a poignant celebratory remembrance of Dr. King’s life and struggle as a Civil Rights icon and a proponent of creating political change through non-violence.

For many Donald J. Trump’s MLK Day inaugural portends the continuation of the struggles not only for the Black community but for the nation. There is good reason this is a second non-consecutive inaugural for Trump. His first term in office began less with a promise than a threat. His first inaugural address was dark with a foreboding insinuation of the carnage that was manifest as he mismanaged a pandemic that ultimately killed over a million Americans and over seven million worldwide. In a chart of cases and deaths due to the Coronavirus, The United States stood atop the carnage with the most cases and the greater death toll due, in large part to Trump’s incompetence. Even when compared with other nations by population, our rate per million population speaks of the carnage caused by his active indifference.

This time we are better prepared for what might happen even as we celebrate all Dr. King has left us as his legacy. Today, we understand we are caught between two legacies. The Trump legacy, punctuated by a diminution of rights and viral death all ending with a violent insurrection, stands in contrast to King’s non-violence which ended in his violent death at the hands of racists. The contrasts could not be more stark— and revealing.

When Dr. King spoke of violence he often included a counterintuitive warning for those who employ it as a solution to their problems:

“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate...Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” — Martin Luther King Jr. (1967). Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

Martin had preternatural insight into the psyche of his enemies. He understood them even as they could never understand him. Trump, ever the beer bully, uses language as his cudgel, and as on January 6, 2021, stands at arm’s length of the violence he advocates. Today we await the second chance Martin Luther King never had to deliver his message in support of sanitation workers in Memphis. He was there because of a strike that began after 2 sanitation workers were crushed to death in a compactor during a rainstorm:

The main catalysts for the workers’ 1968 strike included frustration over “rainy day” policies that sent Black workers home during rainstorms while white workers continued to get paid and dismay over the preventable deaths of two Black workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, on February 1. The two had taken shelter in their truck’s compactor during a rainstorm, and a malfunctioning compressing piston jammed them into the compactor, crushing them. T.O. Jones—a union organizer who led the 1963 walkout and was fired for his union activities—had already asked the city to stop using this particular truck, saying it was too old and worn out. The state’s workers’ compensation program did not cover Cole and Walker, so their families were left destitute. The city offered the families their sympathy and a paltry $500 to put toward funeral expenses. — Brittanica

Back in the day, at least in Memphis, Tennessee, the life of two black sanitation workers was valued at $500 and the prescribed scrap of sympathy. On the night before his death, Dr. King seemed to foresee his death:

I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live – a long life; longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will… — delivered 3 April 1968, Mason Temple (Church of God in Christ Headquarters), Memphis, Tennessee

Today is a contrast not only between two men who were brought together by a quirk of the calendar but of imagination. Dr. King envisioned a nation driven by conscience and humanity. Trump’s world is dark and callous. One world is inviting and offers peace and security. The other is consciously uninviting and chaotic.

We have an inauguration day here in America every four years because we honor our right as citizens to choose our leaders. Today, on the day we celebrate the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., we will once again live with the consequences of our choices— on one of the darker nights of a nation’s soul.

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