The US has honored Martin Luther King Jr (MLK) with a federal holiday for nearly four decades, yet still has not fully embraced and acted on the lessons from the slain civil rights leader, his youngest daughter said on Monday.
Bernice King, who leads The King Center in Atlanta, said that the nation’s leaders — especially politicians — too often cheapen her father’s legacy into a “comfortable and convenient King” offering easy platitudes.
“We love to quote King in and around the holiday ... but then we refuse to live King 365 days of the year,” she said at a commemorative service at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where her father once preached.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The service, organized by the center and held at Ebenezer annually, headlined observances of the 38th federal holiday.
MLK, who was gunned down in Memphis in 1968 as he advocated for better pay and working conditions for the city’s sanitation workers, would have celebrated his 94th birthday on Sunday.
Bernice King said that she is “exhausted, exasperated and, frankly, disappointed” to hear her father’s words about justice quoted so extensively alongside “so little progress” addressing racism, economic and healthcare inequities, police violence, a militarized international order, hardline immigration structures and the climate crisis.
“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,” she said. “Dr King, the inconvenient King, puts some demands on us to change our ways.”
US President Joe Biden addressed an MLK breakfast hosted in Washington by Al Sharpton’s National Action Network.
Sharpton got his start as a civil rights organizer in his teens as youth director of an anti-poverty project of MLK’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
“This is a time for choosing,” Biden said, repeating themes from a speech he delivered on Sunday at Ebenezer at the invitation of US Senator Raphael Warnock, the senior pastor at Ebenezer.
“Will we choose democracy over autocracy, or community over chaos? Love over hate?” Biden asked on Monday. “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.”
Elsewhere in Washington, Martin Luther King III attended a wreath-laying ceremony at the national memorial to his father, while US Vice President Kamala Harris spoke to volunteers at a day of service project at George Washington University.
Thousands attended a memorial march in San Antonio.
In Los Angeles, the Kingdom Day Parade returned after a two-year break due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Other commemorations echoed Bernice King’s reminder and Biden’s allusions that the “Beloved Community” — Martin Luther King’s descriptor for a world in which all people are free from fear, discrimination, hunger and violence — remains elusive.
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu (吳弭) talked about advancing truth.
“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 said.
Wu said that education would restore trust.
Quoting MLK Jr, she called for overcoming the “fatigue of despair” to enact change. “It is sometimes in those moments when we feel most tired, most despairing, that we are just about to break through,” she told attendees at a memorial breakfast.
In Selma, Alabama, a seminal site in the civil rights movement, Maine House of Representatives Speaker Rachel Ross on Monday urged residents to honor King’s memory by joining in acts of service.
“His unshakable faith, powerful nonviolent activism, and his vision for peace and justice in our world altered the course of history,” Ross said in a statement.
“We must follow his example of leading with light and love, and recommit ourselves to building a more compassionate, just and equal community,” she added.
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