Long ago I conditioned myself to stop thinking about what Martin Luther King would do in various situations. However, Lawrence O’Donald on his show, The Last Word, brought those thoughts rushing back as he called Senator Chris Van Hollen’s visit to his constituent Kilmar Abrego Garcia in El Salvidor on April 17 a Martin Luther King moral moment.
O’Donnell opined that he had wondered several times in these early days of the second Trump presidency what Martin Luther King would do. However, he was certain that one day that week MLK would be in El Salvidor, even if on other days he would be elsewhere in the world addressing some of the damage that Trump is doing.
Jonathan Eig, a biographer of MLK, offered similar and more extensive comments in his New York Times article “For Those Who Wish to Fight Back but Don’t Know How.”
Jonathan Eig wrote, “For those who disapprove of [Trump’s] tactics, who prefer mercy for the marginalized and who wish to fight back but don’t know how, Dr. King’s 7,000 word Letter From Birmingham Jail shows the way.”
He continued, “The Episcopal bishop Mariann Edgar Budde demonstrated Dr. King’s peaceful protest in January when she asked Mr. Trump at an inauguration service to show compassion to immigrants and L.G.B.T.Q. people. Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland did the same last month when he met with Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who was wrongly deported, in El Salvador. One might imagine a delegation of American religious leaders following the senator’s and Dr. King’s examples and marching in front of the prison where Mr. Abrego Garcia is detained and demanding his release, their number growing by the day and week as Americans recognize that one man’s arbitrary loss of rights threatens all of our rights.
“.Dr. King almost always erred on the side of confrontation, which is why, rather than just wait for his release, he began scribbling his letter from the Birmingham jail on napkins, newspaper scraps, and toilet paper . . .
“Democracy is a pact that depends on individuals for its survival. The moment one group decides that it no longer respects the pact, the system can collapse. Dr. King’s letter from the Birmingham jail is a tribute to democracy and a plea for the renewal of the contract that binds us. Black men and women, the descendants of enslaved people, showed the nation that they loved American democracy enough to fight for it. Those who faced arrest and assault for their lunch-counter protests in the South, Dr. King wrote, were ‘standing up for what is best in the American dream’ and ‘bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers.’
Dr. King suffered to prove his faith in God and America. He was arrested 29 times before his assassination in 1968.
“What would Dr. King do today? In his sermons, speeches, and essays, he gave us the answer. He told us that while elected officials may try to divide us by stoking resentment and rage, we shouldn’t let them . . . He told us not to expect immediate results. We often forget, in telling Dr. King’s story today, how many of his organized protests were judged failures in their time, from Albany, Ga., to Chicago. Even his efforts in Birmingham were faltering for weeks, with participation falling off and media interest fading, until the city’s youth joined the protests and reinvigorated the movement.
“Today Dr. King would certainly call on elected leaders to change unjust policies, and he would get specific in his demands . . . He might call for economic boycotts to pressure business leaders, as he did in Birmingham. He might lean on the respectability of clergy, as he often did, to seize the moral high ground. That might mean asking clergy members to stand at schoolhouse doors to block the removal of children of undocumented immigrants.”
Remembering Dr. King, we are called to moral action. Fortunately, many people have already been moved to act.
