2025 MLK Day Materials

Below are various materials (print, video, etc.) based on Memorial for a Dream? (Or, Getting Our “Fight” Back) – this year’s MLK Day Open Letter.

I wrote my first such letter last year, following in the tradition of Martin’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. That led to the launching of Letters from a Birmingham Boy (which is where I grew up) and the 2024 Election Reflections posted here, along with other pieces.

All this writing stands on the sociological analysis and history-telling contained in This Land Is Your Land, a book project that took me a decade to complete, and on the humanitarian values modeled for me growing up by people by people in Birmingham, and especially by the grandmother who raised me, as described in Me and Mary.

This 2025 letter centers on the opposing ideologies on display on January 20^th – represented by Martin’s dream and Trump’s inauguration – and what that juxtaposition has to teach us. But its focus is on action — how we get our “fight” back. My goal, especially at this pivotal time, is to help us cut through the haze, quiet the noise; helping us spot the distortions that lead us into the quicksand, including:

Focusing on Trump instead of on the 50-year strategy that made his reelection possible,
Questioning why Kamala didn’t “get out the vote” when she got more votes than every presidential candidate in history – including those running in the 2008, 2012 and 2016 elections – surpassed only by Biden and Trump, and,
Assuming that voter apathy is the culprit; which means we’re not looking at the real culprit – vote suppression.

Then, there are the ways I, as a minister, have seen faith racialized, militarized and pointed like a weapon at humanitarian society. We think the erosion of democracy began with Trump. It didn’t. It began in the 1960s when, after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, an ideological faction realized they could no longer reign by simply showing up at the ballot box. By claiming “majority rules”. They had to start finding ways to hack democracy. And they did, from a Christianized SCOTUS to the gutting of that same Voting Rights Act, whose 60^th anniversary we should be celebrating this year, from a majority in Congress to a second Trump presidency.

Yet, despite how dire things seem, there is good news. Due to our changing demography, this is conceivably the last election this shrinking, minority faction can ever win. IF the new majority, we who believe in an America that works for all of us, a land made for both you and me, own our power. That starts with the vote but goes far beyond it. That’s why, at least for the next four years, MLK Day can’t just be about service, which shifts us away from assessing the state of society and toward individual good deeds. Or, as Martin said, flinging a coin to a beggar instead of dismantling the edifice that rendered them beggars in the first place.

Like the Black Panthers and their Free Breakfast for Kids and community clinics and protecting people from police abuses, we start with service. But we also resist oppression, redress injustice and restore our faith in humanity. And in the dream.