This year, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would have turned 97 on Jan. 15, and four days later— on the official Monday holiday recognizing the civil rights activist’s life— people across the District, nation, and world held programs and marches that not only celebrated his legacy, but offered calls to action.
King would remind us that moments of moral testing are not new—and that progress has never come without pressure, persistence, and participation.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” King warned in his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” insisting that our fates are bound together.
The turbulence of our time—political division, economic anxiety, and assaults on truth—would not surprise the fallen faith leader. He would urge us not to grow weary or cynical, but to stay anchored in what he called “the fierce urgency of now,” words he uttered in the 1963 March on Washington.
The freedom fighter would also speak to memory. We are, as a people, a resurrection people. Our ancestors faced chattel slavery, lynching, segregation, disfranchisement, and terror—and they survived. They organized, prayed, marched, litigated, and voted. They bent history by refusing to surrender their dignity.
As Dr. King said in his 1960 address at Spelman College, “If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.” The ancestors’ forward motion is our inheritance.
A son, father, husband and brother, King would caution against despair and dehumanization, and prioritize love. For Dr. King, love was not sentimentality; it was disciplined action—nonviolent, strategic, and relentless in the pursuit of justice.
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that,” he said in his sermon “Loving Your Enemies,” in the late 1950s, and included in his 1963 book “Strength to Love.”
Ever grounded in truth, King would be clear about democracy. King knew that protest and policy are partners. Marches open doors; ballots keep them open. He would remind us that the vote is not a gift but a tool—hard-won, often attacked, and always necessary. The celebrated activist would emphasize: to abstain is to abandon the field; to participate is to honor those who paid the price to make participation possible.
Ninety-seven years after his birthday, and 58 years after his assassination, King would advise us to remember who we are, keep moving forward, and translate moral conviction into civic action. That means organizing, serving, and showing up to vote so that the long “arc of the moral universe,” he spoke of in his last Sunday sermon— delivered at the Washington National Cathedral on March 31, 1968— continues to “bend toward justice.”