The United States has honored Martin Luther King Jr. with a federal holiday for nearly four decades, but has yet to fully embrace and apply the slain civil rights leader’s lessons, his youngest daughter said Monday.
The Rev. Bernice King, who runs The King Center in Atlanta, said leaders, especially politicians, too often discount her father’s legacy to a “comfortable and convenient King” who offers easy platitudes.
“We love to quote King during and around the holiday… But then we refuse to live King 365 days a year,” he said at a memorial service at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where his father once preached.
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The service, hosted by the center and held annually in Ebenezer, headlined celebrations for the King’s 38th federal holiday. King, shot to death in Memphis in 1968 while advocating for better wages and working conditions for the city’s sanitation workers, reportedly celebrated his 94th birthday on Sunday.
Her voice rising and falling in cadences similar to her father’s, Bernice King lamented institutional and individual racism, health care and economic inequalities, police violence, a militarized international order, hardline immigration structures, and the climate crisis. She said she is “exhausted, exasperated and, frankly, disappointed” to hear her father’s words about justice quoted so widely along with “so little progress” in addressing society’s most serious problems.
“He was God’s prophet sent to this nation and even to the world to guide and warn us… A prophetic word calls for trouble because it challenges us to change our hearts, our minds and our behavior,” said Bernice King. “Dr. King, the inconvenient king, demands that we change our ways.”
Crowds gather to watch a wreath-laying ceremony at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in Washington, Jan. 16, 2023.
(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
President Joe Biden addressed an MLK breakfast hosted in Washington by the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network. Sharpton got his start as a civil rights organizer in his teens as the youth director of an anti-poverty project for King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
“This is a time to choose,” Biden said, repeating themes from a speech he gave Sunday at Ebenezer at the invitation of Sen. Raphael Warnock, Ebenezer’s senior pastor, who recently won re-election to a full term as Georgia’s first black. . US Senator
“Shall we choose democracy over autocracy, or community over chaos? Love over hate?” Biden asked Monday. “These are the questions of our time that I ran for president to try to help answer… The life and legacy of Dr. King, in my opinion, shows the way forward.”
Elsewhere in Washington, Martin Luther King III attended a wreath-laying ceremony at the national memorial to his father. And Vice President Kamala Harris, the first woman and person of color to hold office, 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 is back after a two-year hiatus due to the pandemic.
Other commemorations echoed Bernice King’s reminder and Biden’s allusions that the “Beloved Community,” Martin Luther King’s description of a world where all people are free from fear, discrimination, hunger, and violence, remains elusive.
In Boston, Mayor Michelle Wu spoke about advancing the truth in an age of hyperpartisanship and misinformation.
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“We are fighting not just two camps, left or right, and a gradient in between that has to be compromised somehow, but a growing movement of hate, abuse, extremism and white supremacy fueled by misinformation, fueled by by conspiracy theories that are taking root at all levels,” he said.
Wu, Boston’s first woman and person of color to be elected mayor, said education restores trust. Citing King, she called for overcoming “desperation fatigue” to enact the change. “Sometimes it is in those moments when we feel most tired, most desperate, that we are about to break through,” Wu told attendees at a memorial breakfast.
Volunteers in Philadelphia conducted service projects focused on gun violence prevention. The city has seen a surge in homicides that killed 516 people last year and 562 the year before, the highest total in at least six decades.
Some participants in the effort’s flagship project, run by the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, worked to assemble gun safety kits for public distribution. The kits include “pistol cable locks and additional child-resistant security devices,” according to organizers. They also include information on storing firearms, information on health and social services, and coping with the aftermath of gun violence.
Other kits being assembled highlighted Temple University Hospital’s “Fighting Chance” program and included materials to enable immediate response to victims at the scene of shootings, organizers said. The recipients will be trained in the use of the materials, which include tourniquets, gauze pads, chest seals and other items to treat critical injuries, they said.
In Selma, Alabama, a pivotal site in the civil rights movement, residents were commemorating King as they recovered from a deadly storm system that struck the South last week.
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King was not present on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge for the initial march known as “Bloody Sunday,” when Alabama state troops attacked and beat protesters in March 1965. But he did join a subsequent procession that successfully crossed the bridge to the Capitol in Montgomery, highlighting efforts that prompted Congress to pass and President Lyndon Johnson to sign the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The Pettus Bridge emerged unscathed from Thursday’s storm.
The first speaker for the Maine Black House urged residents Monday to honor King’s memory by joining acts of service.
“Her unwavering faith, her powerful nonviolent activism, and her vision for peace and justice in our world altered the course of history,” Rachel Talbot Ross said in a statement. Talbot Ross is also the daughter of Maine’s first black legislator and former president of the Portland NAACP.
“We must follow his example of leading with light and love and recommit to building a more compassionate, just and equal community,” he added.
At Ebenezer, Warnock, who has led the congregation for 17 years, praised his predecessor’s role in ensuring access to ballots for African-Americans. But, like Bernice King, the senator cautioned against a reductionist understanding of King.
“Don’t just call him a civil rights leader. He was a religious leader,” Warnock said. “Faith was the foundation on which he did everything he did. You don’t face dogs and water hoses because you read Nietzsche or Niebuhr. You have to take advantage of that thing, that God that he said he met again in Montgomery when someone threatened to bomb his house and kill his wife and new son.
King, Warnock said, “left the comfort of a filter that made the whole world his parish,” turning faith into “the creative weapon of love and nonviolence.”
While echoing Bernice King’s call for bolder public policy, Warnock noted some progress in her life. As he did during two Senate campaigns, Warnock noted that he was born a year after King’s assassination, when both Georgia senators were staunch segregationists, including one Warnock described as loving “blacks” as long as he was “in his place in the back.” gate.”
But Warnock said: “Because of what Dr. King did and what he did… now I sit in his seat.”
