Martin Luther King Jr. looked out at a multihued gathering of revolutionaries when he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28, 1963. A quarter of a million Black, Brown, and White Americans stood shoulder to shoulder on the National Mall’s grassy expanse as part of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It was a testament to the transformative power of coalition, one that was sharply focused on dismantling inequity.  

A few years later, King sought to organize marginalized communities around an economic equity crusade — the Poor People’s March — before his assassination. Ultimately, the impact of those efforts was blunted by fractured aims of the groups involved and hyperbolic media focus on the movement’s logistical dysfunction and disunity. 

Over the next 60 years, in communities across the country, Black and Brown activists forged pivotal, yet often under-acknowledged, relationships around the fight to dismantle systemic racism and economic inequality.

These grand scale multiracial coalition-building efforts would be met with mixed levels of success.

And, yet, build we must.

In roughly 20 years, the United States will be a nation predominantly composed of people of color. This dramatic demographic shift demands a radical reshape of every American institution — from local schools to the federal government. However, demographics are not destiny and are not a predictor of political or social allegiances, nor grounding in a common cause. In fact, exit polling from the 2024 elections highlighted stark and acrimonious divisions among some communities of color. 

The Emancipator asked more than 30 activists, lawmakers, and academics to weigh in with their thoughts on a day in which we first and foremost, honor King’s legacy and devotion to equity and community building. We also bear witness as Donald Trump, the antithesis of those aims, ascends to a second term in the White House — which could portend the eradication of hard-fought equity gains and a dark period of struggle for Black and Brown communities and our allies.

The question for these unprecedented times: How can Black and Brown communities navigate our differences and combine our collective might for the fight ahead? 

Here’s what they had to say.

Answer the call to action

“In this moment of intensifying state violence and rising fascism, the question of how Black and Brown communities can build meaningful solidarity feels especially urgent … transformative solidarity isn’t built through statements or one-time actions — it’s cultivated through sustained relationship-building and showing up for each other’s struggles over time.” — Adaku Utah, senior manager, Building Movement Project

Credit: Jaya Savita

“As we face an increasingly challenging political climate, the road ahead for Black, Latinx, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders is tenuous — especially for immigrants — and protecting our communities will require us to work together to amplify the voices of those most impacted and hold leaders accountable.” — Jaya Savita Aiyer, director of the of the Asian Pacific Islanders Civic Action Network (APIs CAN) 

“By engaging with stories that feature the points of view of people that we don’t get to meet normally, we learn about those different threads that connect us.”

Tony Weaver Jr., writer and educator

Sit with and learn from uncomfortable truths 

Credit: Adaku Utah

“Building transformative solidarity between our communities requires moving beyond surface-level allyship to address the hard truths: the ways anti-Blackness shows up in our organizing spaces, the different ways state violence uniquely impacts our communities, and the power dynamics we need to transform in order to build the collective power we need to win. This means creating brave spaces where we can have honest conversations about power imbalances, longings, and possibilities while recognizing our shared futures.” — Adaku Utah, Building Movement Project

Credit: Lorgia Garcia Pena

“We need to come to coalition building with the understanding that there is a lot that we do not know about the different communities that make up the labels Black and/or Brown and that this lack of knowledge often leads to misunderstandings, mistranslations and even resentment.” — Lorgia García-Peña, writer, activist and Latinx scholar at Princeton University 

Credit: Peniel Joseph

“The political backlash since the 2020 apex of the Black Lives Matter movement is premised on the longstanding idea that anti-Black racism can become the bedrock that fuels a White supremacist revival domestically and globally. Trump and MAGA invited a broad range of political actors into an authoritarian coalition that ridiculed DEI, scapegoated Black history, and demonized the civil rights and Black Power struggles that built a rough racial justice consensus in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement’s heroic period. To fight back against this onslaught requires the political courage that defined Black folk during and after racial slavery. We need to create Reconstructionist narratives emphasizing the importance of multiracial democracy and the way in which Black (and) Brown coalitions will be key against the backdrop of our ongoing Third Reconstruction.” — Peniel Joseph, scholar at the University of Texas, Austin, and author of The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century

Credit: Makeeba McCreary

“Too often, outside forces or self-appointed representatives attempt to dictate the priorities of our communities. Then, those with the ability to actualize a response should take immediate steps to do so. This might be in the form of investing financial resources, creating space for a new narrative or relinquishing power to the communities most impacted and supporting the implementation of impactful solutions. … Those with power — regardless of their race or ethnicity — must take this lesson to heart.” — Makeeba McCreary, president of the New Commonwealth Racial Equity and Social Justice Fund

Learn from common legacies

“Beyond recognizing what we do not know and being open to learning from one another, we also need to hold on to what we do know and what unites us: common legacies of colonialism and slavery, histories of migration and disfranchisement, and the urgent need for representation, justice and equity. We need to remember the words of Black Latino scholar and collector Arthur Schomburg, who invited us to work together, to build together in order to recover some of “what slavery took away.” That should be our mandate and our radical hope. — Lorgia García-Peña, Princeton University

Credit: Manjusha Kulkarni

“Black, Latinx, Asian American, Pacific Islander (AAPI), and other communities of color share a long history of standing together against injustice, from the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s to more recent fights to advocate for affirmative action and pass ethnic studies. In the face of rampant White supremacy, our shared legacy of cross-racial solidarity serves as a powerful reminder that unity across diverse communities is essential to protecting human rights and advancing equity.” — Manjusha Kulkarni, co-founder STOP AAPI Hate

Credit: Gabes Torres

“A common ground Black and Brown folks share is that we, in varying degrees, are up against the same oppressors, whether that be White supremacy, racial capitalism and exploitation, and global imperialism. … I find that a direction toward something beautiful rather than a posture of standing against an oppressive force can sustain us more, because our desires and dreams have always emboldened us to mobilize, persist, and co-create.” — Gabes Torres, mental health practitioner, grassroots organizer, and writer

Stop fighting for crumbs. Demand the whole damn pie!

Credit: Maurice Mitchell

“Black and Brown people have to keep one thing top of mind as we build coalitions: We can fight each other for crumbs from the pie or we can fight together for huge slices of the pie. We don’t have to be the best of friends to be in principled struggle and believe that there are more than enough resources for all of us to thrive. We simply have to remember that there’s a bigger ‘we,’ and remain focused on fighting the bigger adversary that wants to keep us at each other’s throats.” — Maurice Mitchell, national director, Working Families Party

“Part of our power is convening and being one with each other.”

Imari Paris Jeffries, president and CEO, Embrace Boston

Build the beloved community

Credit: Sen. Raphael Warnock

“Like any family, our American family has a complicated story, but I believe we’re all at our best when we remember the age-old covenant we keep with each other as Americans: “E Pluribus Unum — Out of Many, One.” I believe that when we center people we have a better chance of getting the policy right, and it creates opportunities for Black and Brown communities — and all of us — to find common ground.” — Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Georgia

Credit: Ai-jen Poo

“Organizations are essential spaces of belonging, meaning-making and connection across race. We must strengthen and build more that work across race in this way, rooted in both the specific experiences of each community and the common dreams of dignity and opportunity that we all share.” — Ai-jen Poo, president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance

Credit: Fabiana Gibim

“The sirens of an emergency calling for our unification have echoed for a thousand years. From countless ancestral cultures, like the Guaranis — my own — we have learned that we find our togetherness in movement. … We are thousands of survivors of a history written by colonizers and exploiters, all while radically imagining a present and a future in which we can thrive. The total change will come in a form we cannot yet envision — Black, Brown and Indigenous imagination is a world-making, world-shattering force. … Finding common ground in this era requires creating an insurrectionary, anti-colonial imagination, capable of demanding the impossible and using it as the driving force of our movements in order to crush colonialism.” — Fabiana Gibim, writer, publicist, and grants manager at Crushing Colonialism

Creative Commons License

Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.

Halimah Abdullah is an award winning veteran national political journalist with more than 20 years of experience covering politics and government at the local, state, and federal level. She has edited and helped manage Washington coverage for such organizations as PolitiFact, Newsela, NPR, ABC News and NBC News — networks where she also wrote. Her work has also appeared in Newsweek, Capital B, CNN.com, Newsday, McClatchy newspapers, MSNBC.com, thegrio.com, TODAY.com, and The New York Times, among...