This year’s Martin Luther King Jr. holiday unfolded in an American political landscape filled with heartbreaking juxtapositions. In many symbolic and substantive ways, the King holiday represents a repository of real and imagined freedom dreams that predate its official recognition in 1983. Those dreams will live on long past our current moment of White racial backlash.

In an Orwellian display of dissemblance, President Donald Trump’s inaugural address tried to claim parts of King’s legacy. “Today is Martin Luther King Day,” Trump said during his address, adding that “in his honor, we will strive together to make his dream a reality. We will make his dream come true.”

A man whose venality is antithetical to all that King hoped America might one day become, continued a rhetorical strategy based on blatant lies, racist falsehoods, and the advocacy of White supremacy.

Symbols of segregation abounded during Trump’s inauguration. The overwhelmingly White and wealthy attendees in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda contrasted with the Trump followers — several blocks away in Washington, D.C.’s Capitol One Arena, and less wealthy by lifetimes — who crowded into a sports arena. Claiming an unearned mandate after winning the national popular vote by 1.5 points in November, Trump promised to reverse many policies advancing social justice and racial equality.

After citing King’s dream and thanking the relatively small number of Black and Hispanic voters who chose him, Trump promised to “forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based,” cloaking his White nationalism in a thin layer of unifying rhetoric that turned rotten the moment that he spoke it aloud.

King’s life of service and political activism represents a legacy of radical Black citizenship transcending civil and voting rights. Over the evolution of his 12-year public career, King understood citizenship as encompassing a living wage, health care for all, environmental and racial justice, and the cessation of violence and war.

King delineated his theory of justice in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, written in the wake of his 1963 arrest during an iconic campaign to end Jim Crow racism and White supremacy in the Confederacy’s citadel. Decades before the Black Lives Matter movement experienced a similar betrayal, King excoriated White conservatives and liberals, lamenting the obtuseness of clerics who asked the movement and Black folk to halt demonstrations and the liberal allies who felt more comfortable with an unjust peace than the disruption caused by civil rights demonstrations.

Martin Luther King Jr. speaks from a car to a crowd assembled along a neighborhood street in Chicago, Illinois. Date unknown. Credit: University of Illinois at Chicago Library / Flickr

Trump’s election victories represent the coming to power of everything that King found morally reprehensible and politically indefensible regarding American democracy. Trump personifies the corruption, hypocrisy, and rank stupidity of the White supremacist ideals that continue to venerate the nation’s original sin of racial slavery. 

His second inauguration coincides with the King holiday in ways that highlight the duality of the nation’s Third Reconstruction. This latest period follows on the heels of two extraordinary earlier periods. The first, which lasted from 1865 to 1898, with the end of racial slavery and the White riot in Wilmington, North Carolina, foreshadowing an era that found the institutionalization of Black citizenship and the steadfast maintenance of Black dignity threatened by the rise of White terror groups, convict leasing, sharecropping, and peonage. 

King symbolized the Second Reconstruction, the high point of which, from 1954 to 1968, represents the Civil Rights Movement’s heroic period. The activism of sharecroppers such as Fannie Lou Hamer, organizers including Ella Baker, and young people who joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) helped to transform American democracy. 

Yet, the King most popularly remembered today bears little resemblance to the revolutionary human rights leader and anti-colonial and anti-imperialist figure who spoke truth to power at the cost of his own life. King’s iconography has become plastic enough to be co-opted by politicians, law enforcement, and oligarchs whose actions and politics run counter to the goals the civil rights leader expressed during his life.

One year to the day before King’s 1968 assassination in Memphis, he delivered one of his most important speeches at the Riverside Church in New York City. Aware that the moment had arrived when “silence” transforms into “betrayal,” King passionately rejected the Vietnam War, publicly broke with the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, and warned of the “triple evils” of racism, militarism, and materialism that posed an existential threat to not just America, but the entire world. 

King’s murder took place amid a Poor People’s Campaign in support of sanitation workers on strike for a living wage, designed to illuminate the connection between multiracial poverty, war, violence, and capitalist exploitation of workers and natural resources.

At Riverside, King characterized the challenges that lay ahead as a “bitter … but beautiful struggle” for social and racial justice, one that held the potential to redeem America’s wounded and weary national soul.

We need to listen to King’s defiant optimism now more than ever. Due to cold weather, Trump moved his inauguration indoors, meaning that many of the same people who celebrated the Jan. 6 siege on the Capitol four years ago sat in cozy warmth as honored guests. 

America is in the wake of a modern-day restoration, with a rogues’ gallery of villains awaiting key Cabinet posts that would have been unimaginable in the wake of the Second Reconstruction. That period ushered in a half-century of racial justice consensus that, while imperfect, prevented the raw racism of the present from completely engulfing the country and its institutions.

Yet, hope remains in the example of King, one of the iconic martyrs of the Black Freedom Struggle who remains undefeated in life and death. King continued to organize on behalf of multiracial democracy until he drew his last breath. Near the end of his life, King, always an eager student of American history, passionately discussed the lost promise of Reconstruction. King understood that after racial slavery, America told itself two stories: Reconstructionist and Redemptionist. King, especially toward the end of his life, eloquently shared the Reconstruction story of how multiracial democracy after the Civil War was thwarted by White racial violence, racist policies, and lies that rationalized White supremacy in service of systemic oppression. 

King also called out the Redemptionist impulses among Dixiecrats, White supremacists, and voters who waged a politics of backlash that have continued to parallel racial progress during and after America’s Second Reconstruction.

King’s efforts to mobilize a multiracial coalition of poor people did not end with his death, as witnessed by contemporary efforts to organize a national Poor People’s Campaign with theologian and activist William Barber. Now, in the wake of Trump’s second inauguration, is the time to build a multiracial coalition whose common denominator is recognizing the universality of the struggle for Black citizenship and dignity.  

Historically, this movement has reverberated to all marginalized groups and communities in America — from Hispanics to Asian American Pacific Islanders and Indigenous peoples to the disabled, LGBTQIA+, and poor Whites. We must steadfastly resist divisive efforts that attack racial justice as “wokeness” and smear Black presence in predominantly White spaces.

Book bans, anti-DEI hysteria, and affirmative action policies are not the result of social justice run amok, but the exact opposite. The current backlash is based on a profound fear of multiracial democracy, led by the abolitionist democracy impulses forged in the centuries-long Black struggle.

However, history is not hatred.

King’s understanding of this offers us an alternative path beyond cynicism, doom scrolling, or accepting White supremacist authoritarian fascism as a fait accompli. As King’s life reminds us, another world is possible.

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Peniel E. Joseph is the Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and professor of history and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a frequent national commentator on issues of antiracism, democracy and civil rights. Joseph’s most recent book is, “The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.”