The 47th President and the Post-Biden World

On Monday we’re celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day and inaugurating Donald Trump as the 47th president of the United States. That may seem like an odd pairing, especially to those of us who believe Mr. Trump has fueled a culture of skepticism, denial and indifference to matters of injustice.

But if Dr. King’s life taught us anything, it is that hope is most useful when the evidence runs the other way toward despair. Set against dark times, hope points us toward something better.

Dr. King’s ministry took place in a country marked by segregation, an unpopular war abroad and the widespread social and economic disenfranchisement of African Americans.

This is not 1963. But the troubled times many of us feel we are in make Dr. King’s message especially relevant.

The occasion of his “I Have a Dream” speech, the 1963 March on Washington, came in the wake of a long season of anti-Black violence. In May of that year protests against racial segregation in Birmingham, Ala., which came to be known as the Children’s Crusade, had been met with fire hoses, police dogs and batons. That same month saw an angry mob assault the sit-in that took place at a Woolworth’s in Jackson, Miss. In June, the civil rights activist Medgar Evers was murdered outside his home, also in Jackson.
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When Dr. King imagined in his speech that someday “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will sit down together at the table of brotherhood,” that dream served as an alternative to the bloody and dispiriting reality of the present.

Dr. King didn’t run from this evil or deny its reality, but he also did not let despondency have the final word. “I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history,” he said during his 1964 acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize. “I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsam and jetsam in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.”

He looked at the stark reality of his present and dared to defy it.

Dr. King was buoyed by a vision of peace between God and humanity outlined by the Hebrew prophets in the Bible. The hope he turned to was first forged in the Black church tradition of his youth. That tradition often had to rely upon divine assistance because it did not have political or economic power.

In that same Nobel Prize speech he said, “I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive good will proclaim the rule of the land.”

Our troubles now in the United States are not the product of one election. The past decade or so of American life has seen an unending parade of mass shootings, racially motivated violence, economic instability and wars in Israel, Gaza and Ukraine where innocent civilians have suffered.

Speaking about the problems is not the hard part. Much more difficult is to find the strength to believe there is a hope beyond our jeremiads. Despair has never liberated anybody.

I am still inspired by Dr. King’s witness, but I do not believe that we can be content with borrowing his dream. It’s not enough for someone sitting in the rubble of 1963 to outline a vision that helped create the more just world we inhabit. We need someone who picked his or her way through the partial ruin of recent years to deliver a fresh word.

We need more people with the courage to say that we do not have to see the foreigner as a threat but instead as a fellow bearer of the image of God. To see the struggles in our cities for what they are, not as a means of changing the subject. And to recognize that rural America is more than a place where resentments and votes can be whipped up — it needs revitalization.

We can’t push suffering onto others without it returning to us. Our world is interconnected whether we want to acknowledge it or not. We can’t build walls high enough to blot out the world’s problems, but we can extend our hands far enough to make a difference in the lives of those who are hurting.

Dr. King is a model through his very act of hoping. That is his great gift to us. We honor him well if we remember that the third Monday in January is still for the dreamers.

You hear sometimes, now that we know the sordid details of the lives of some of our leading figures, that America has no heroes left.

When I was writing a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, where heroism was pretty thin on the ground, I gave that a lot of thought. And I came to believe that heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed human beings choosing to put others before themselves, even at great cost, even if no one will ever know, even as they realize the walls might be closing in around them.

It means sitting down the night before D-Day and writing a letter praising the troops and taking all the blame for the next day’s failure upon yourself in case things went wrong, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower did.

It means writing in your diary that you “still believe that people are really good at heart,” even while you are hiding in an attic from the men who are soon going to kill you, as Anne Frank did.

It means signing your name to the bottom of the Declaration of Independence in bold print, even though you know you are signing your own death warrant should the British capture you, as John Hancock did.

It means defending your people’s right to practice a religion you don’t share, even though you know you are becoming a dangerously visible target, as Sitting Bull did.

Sometimes it just means sitting down, even when you are told to stand up, as Rosa Parks did.

None of those people woke up one morning and said to themselves that they were about to do something heroic. It’s just that when they had to, they did what was right.

On April 3, 1968, the night before the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a white supremacist, he gave a speech in support of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Since 1966, King had tried to broaden the Civil Rights Movement for racial equality into a larger movement for economic justice. He joined the sanitation workers in Memphis, who were on strike after years of bad pay and such dangerous conditions that two men had been crushed to death in garbage compactors.

After his friend Ralph Abernathy introduced him to the crowd, King had something to say about heroes: “As I listened to Ralph Abernathy and his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about.”

Dr. King told the audience that if God had let him choose any era in which to live, he would have chosen the one in which he had landed. “Now, that’s a strange statement to make,” King went on, “because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around…. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” Dr. King said that he felt blessed to live in an era when people had finally woken up and were working together for freedom and economic justice.

He knew he was in danger as he worked for a racially and economically just America. “I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter…because I’ve been to the mountaintop…. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life…. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”

People are wrong to say that we have no heroes left.

Just as they have always been, they are all around us, choosing to do the right thing, no matter what.

Wishing you all a day of peace for Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2025.