MLK Day Letter - Memorial for a Dream? (Or, Getting Our “Fight” Back.)
Why This Celebration of Martin Luther King's 96th Birthday Must Be, Instead of a Day of Service, a Call to Action.
“What’s Freedom Worth?”
And so, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ I have a dream that one day, even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today! – Martin Luther King, I Have a Dream, Washington Mall, August, 1963.
“Let’s talk about… values.” That was how 90-year-old Gunnar Sønsteby, Norwegian resistance leader and the only recipient of the War Cross with three swords, Norway's highest military decoration began his talk in the biopic Nr. 24. He then proceeded to ask, “What is freedom worth?” For him, the answer was simple: “Almost anything.”
I recalled an interview I once saw of this little girl during the 1963 Birmingham Children’s Crusade, the same one where my mother, aunt and uncle, all as children, marched. “What is it you people want?” the man asked the little girl. Her one-word reply was definitive: “Freedom”. That’s been going around and around in my head, and in my heart, as we near this MLK Day, which, unbelievably, is also the day Donald Trump is being inaugurated.
The morning after the election, I got to work on what would end up being 13 open letters posted here on Letters from a Birmingham Boy, in the tradition of Martin’s famous Letter from Birmingham Jail. Each was my attempt to make sense of where we are, how we got here and what this all says about us as a people. They still are. But, right from the beginning, I was also trying to do something equally important – envision a way forward that neither makes light of our problems nor ignores how far we’ve come. Because the only way the dream dies is if we give up on it, and on the people, we can be.
For many of us, this veneration of a man who terrorized our communities and who has promised to do so much worse, will no doubt make the remembrance of Martin’s birthday feel like a day of mourning. There’s no getting around that. But, it also very well might be the moment of truth we’ve needed since the day we lost him. In 1994, I helped organize San Francisco’s first MLK Day of Service.
Today, I’m aware that this can’t be that. I think it has to be something else, something more. Something fitting for where we are now. It has to be our call to action. That starts with recognizing our power, that we, those of us who want an America that works for all of us, rather than just some of us – we are the new majority. And using that power. It starts with getting our “fight” back.
Where We Are Now
I explained in One More Bridge to Cross how this MLK Day marks what would have been Martin’s 96th birthday. And that were he still alive, I imagine him having celebrated Jimmie Carter’s 100th birthday, then, upon President Carter’s passing, sharing eloquently about his extraordinary life. I imagine him reminding us that none of us are too old or too young to fight, and that, no matter what they say, rumors of the movement’s death are greatly exaggerated. “Now there are those who are trying to say now that the civil rights movement is dead,” was how he put it in 1967.
I submit to you that it is more alive today than ever before. What they fail to realize is that we are now in a transition period. We are moving into a new phase of the struggle. The new phase is a struggle for genuine equality… on all levels, and this will be a much more difficult struggle. You see, the gains in the first period, or the first era of struggle, were obtained from the power structure at bargain rates; it didn’t cost the nation anything to integrate lunch counters. It didn’t cost the nation anything to integrate hotels and motels. It didn’t cost the nation a penny to guarantee the right to vote. Now we are in a period where it will cost the nation billions of dollars to get rid of poverty, to get rid of slums, to make quality integrated education a reality. This is where we are now.
And unbelievably, this is still where we are today. The question on my mind as we approach this MLK Day is simply, "How is this possible?"
How did we end up right back here, as if Selma and Birmingham, sit-ins and freedom rides, Stonewall and women's liberation, the nationwide grape boycott in support of migrant farm workers and the march on Washington, never happened? How did the same body that decided for the people on Brown v. Board and Lovings v. Virginia abandon its most sacred purpose – to protect the disadvantaged from the power-holders – and end up deciding against the people on everything from Citizens United to making it practically impossible to hold the president accountable?
How did we, on this day when we should be celebrating the 60th anniversary of the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, one of our nation's greatest achievements, end up witnessing the consequences of its dismantling, watching what, by all indications, will be a coronation of supremacy and religious imperialism and Make America Great Again-ism all on the day we should be striving for Martin’s dream? It goes back to the events of 1968.
Since this last election, we’ve been fixated on why people didn’t "get out the vote" for Kamala, but that's the wrong question. First, they did vote. She secured more votes than either Trump (63 million) or Hillary (66 million) in 2016, more than either Obama (66 million) or Romney (61 million) in 2012, and more than either Obama (69 million) or McCain (61 million) in 2008. She secured more votes than any candidate in US history behind Biden and Trump. And second, though it’s true that only two-thirds of voting-age Americans voted, that’s been the case for every election since 1968, the election that was supposed to change everything.
Decades ago, televangelist and de facto head of the New Right Pat Robertson began publicly laying out their strategy. "With the [voter] apathy that exists today, a well-organized minority can influence the selection of candidates to an astonishing degree." And it has. The 2024 voter turnout, not unlike the last 14 before it (with one notable exception – 2020) was exactly what Pat’s faction was counting on.
For them, it didn’t matter that they were no longer the majority (said, even as they were strenuously trying to brand themselves the “Moral Majority”). They’d realized they didn’t need it to hack democracy. All they needed to do was suppress voter turnout among the new majority and get their shrinking minority organized. That’s how we ended up here.
But, something doesn’t add up. In 1964, after LBJ passed the Civil Rights Act, there was an outpouring of support from ethnic minority communities unlike anything we'd ever seen. It gave Johnson the biggest landslide victory since post-colonial days. The passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act should have blown the top off the vote. But it didn't. The polls in 1968 should have been overrun with newly enfranchised voters. They weren’t. To understand why, we have to look at the heartbreaking events that occurred in 1968; prior to the first post-Voting Rights Act election ever held.
On April 4, 1968, Martin, who embodied not just the movement but the dream of us as a better people, was assassinated, followed by RFK – the Democratic front-runner and, in many ways, the holder of this hope for the people. There had even been talk of Bobby selecting Martin as his running mate. I can’t imagine a world where such a ticket, bolstered by the newly passed Voting Rights Act, would not have won. But, in a two-month span of time, they were both gone. I think something died with them. Those losses were like a spear to the chest of the movement.
Even worse, their deaths fed into the unending, unyielding cycle of grief the targeted had been caught up in since the day they dared demand their inalienable rights. This, paired with economic conditions that were getting invariably worse meant that most folk simply had no fight left. Because, no one, no matter how strong we are, can withstand torture forever. This was never about “voter apathy” as Pat framed it. It was, from the beginning, about vote suppression.
History Has Sides
Gunnar: I went to the same school as you 70 years ago. We lived in a democracy. But… some of us felt it starting to tighten around us. Does everyone here feel secure? (Nods from his audience.)
Gunnar: Yes, good. We also felt most secure. All companions of mine, they also felt secure, right to when we were not any longer. For, of course we thought we were living in a post-war state, when we suddenly became aware we had been living in an interwar state.
“An interwar state.” Immediately, I thought of the lyric from the Avett Brothers song, We Americans: "I have been to every state and seen shore to shore, the still open wounds of the Civil War". Right from the beginning, we were a people of two minds. On the one hand, many saw our founding as a chance to start over, do better, aspire higher and become something the world had never seen before, a nation of equals where every human being is endowed with rights that are inalienable. That’s our birthright. But so is the mindset held by some that their faction was inherently superior and far more deserving of all the good things in life, that this land was made for only them. We’ve inherited this as well.
In fact, from the rise of groups like the KKK in post-Reconstruction days to segregation to the culture war waged by racialized religion to Insurrection Day, we have essentially been fighting the same war on different hills for two centuries. There’s been an unbroken chain of lynchings, bombings, town burnings and killer cops stemming from the Greenwood Massacre to Jimmie Lee Jackson, from the murders of Negro WW2 veterans to George Floyd.
That’s what was on my mind when I turned 60 last month. I had the great fortune of being born right at the center of this seismic shift, between the Birmingham campaign and the Selma march, between the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. And all right there in Birmingham, just west of downtown, a mile from 16th Street Baptist Church. Notice the word I used was “fortune”. Because I do believe that simply by accident of birth, I’ve been bequeathed something of great value; an awareness of who we’ve been at our worst and a belief in who we can be at our best.
From tutoring my fellow 7th graders on my back porch to Richard Arrington’s mayoral campaign, from serving as an AIDS chaplain during the height of the epidemic to facilitating relocation for Katrina refugees, from Clergy Against Prop 8 to the Obama campaign, from protesting the war on Iraq to organizing Portland’s Wall of Clergy during the 2020 protests, I’ve tried to invest that fortune back into the land and the people who gave it to me. It then hit me that I’ve been at this in one way or another for 50 years. That’s a long time to be about anything. “No wonder I feel tired,” I remember saying to myself.
And I do. Feel tired. But not as tired as my grandmother Mary, who opted to walk back and forth to her job as a domestic to save up money, along with S&H green stamps, to purchase the blanket she’d vowed to one day bring a sickly newborn me home in. Not as tired as those who lived their entire lives under Jim Crow, or the people who walked from Selma to Montgomery, and whose story I told in One More Bridge to Cross.
And not as tired as 90-year-old Gunnar, who, after fighting back against the Nazis for five years, each day spent within a hair’s breadth of death, then spent 70 years making sure we never forgot. "As long as I live,” Gunnar repeatedly declared, “I will tell the important facts. The historians can analyze, but I was there." And that’s what he did. Right ‘til the end. We must also tell the important facts.
We must remember what it felt like to be an American in an America that had just elected Barack Obama and all that election said, not about Obama as a person but us as a people, and how the world stood with us. Likewise, we must imagine if we were inaugurating Kamala this historic day, that she was bringing the same dignity and grace she exhibited as she ratified the votes on January 6th, instead of taking to the streets and inciting a mob to take the election by force. That’s what could have been. This upcoming inauguration is what we have. But it didn’t have to be.
Extensive polling shows that the 70 million Americans, a full third of our nation’s voting-age population, who didn’t vote, who were too worn down by the constant struggle to simply survive, who’d given up believing it matters, is neither neutral nor undecided. They overwhelmingly support progressive policies. So, if they’d gone to the polls, Kamala’s votes would have skyrocketed. Just as Biden’s did. But, as we know, torture breaks everyone, eventually. It’s, then up to us to find ways to offset the oppression; to do what we must to make people’s lives at least minimally sustainable.
“Resistance work costs money, sir, as you can imagine,” was how Gunnar put it to the bank president who didn’t get that the world had changed. And Gunnar was right. But what’s amazing is how far a relatively small sum can go. Imagine who could participate in juries if a fund could provide them with a living replacement wage for time spent serving, and how this would make justice so much more just.
Imagine the many impassioned, socially aware, extraordinary working-class Americans who could run for office if economics weren’t a barrier. Or, imagine that every person in America had access to real legal representation, to bail money and to the means to hold the power-holders accountable.
Much of this is already being done by organizations close to the work. They’re already resisting. And they’re doing a damned good job. But those most deeply engaged in the struggle are, almost by definition, the most lacking in resources needed to put their wisdom to work. We don’t re-awaken the movement without getting funds to the places that need it most, to the people who are best situated to save us.
“I don't want everybody to vote,” was how Christian Right architect Paul Weyrich, in a 1980 training session for 15,000 preachers, explained it. “Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” That one play has been their go-to for 50 years. But it only works if they create conditions where not everyone votes. And that, we can overcome.
“Your grandchildren will be speaking German,” Gunnar said to the bank president who’d already dismissed him. “What was that?” the man replied. “You do understand that your grandchildren will be speaking German? Here, you have a chance to stand on the right side of history.” That’s why, as tough as January 20th might be, I think we need it. We need the visual, the juxtaposition; something capable of cutting through the haze and quieting the noise. Something that can remind us that history has sides.
“You Can’t Jail a Revolution!”
Looking back, it seems Nazism’s threat to democracy should have been obvious to everyone. But it wasn’t. Take Erling Solheim, Gunnar’s childhood best friend and neighbor. Erling accepted and repeated the rationale he’d heard, that certain measures were necessary to keep the communists “under control”. “It’s the same here, as well,” he continued. “Or else, I mean, it’s Moscow for all of us.” Gunnar challenged that framing, stating that it wasn’t about communism. It was about freedom.
On that, I know pointing out similarities between Nazis and anyone, and especially the incoming Trump administration, means that some people will automatically dismiss me – even when the comparisons are valid. Still, we can’t allow their threats of recrimination to goad us into forgetting what happened there. What I want to make us aware of is how quickly a motivated party, especially one that has power spanning across so many facets of government, not to mention faith institutions, could dismantle democracy.
I’m not saying this is what this ideological faction will do. I’m saying it’s been done before, what they can do. I’m saying that we must never forget that practically, it took only three months, starting with Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor on January 30th, 1933, for Germans of Jewish ancestry to be completely and unequivocally betrayed by their country. Though the specifics would look different (for instance, immigrants instead of Jews), there’s no reason this same speed of change can’t happen here.
Trump, per guidance received from his backers, has vowed to launch the biggest mass deportation scheme in U.S. history, in part by invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 on his first day in office, last used during World War II. The people who spent their own 50 years dismantling democracy, writing restrictive voting laws and bringing people to DC to overturn the election are also imploring Trump to use emergency powers — from the 1976 National Emergencies Act to the 1807 Insurrection Act — in unprecedented ways.
Their Project 2025 recommends the firing of as many as 50,000 federal workers who might get in the way of their agenda, and they’re recommending both the speedy executions of death row inmates (even people for whom there’s evidence they’re innocent), and that agencies from the Federal Trade Commission to the Justice Department be put under the president’s control.
There’s nothing to be gained by hoping they’ll suddenly raise the minimum wage, start addressing climate change and stop insisting that racial, ethnic, and other types of profiling aren’t real. That depressed wages and rising prices won’t result in more families on the streets and more children going hungry. Anything that happens while we’re insisting it won’t happen is on us.
That’s why, as tough as January 20th might be, I think we need it. We need the visual to remind us what’s at stake, that it’s about freedom. For everyone. We need the juxtaposition to infuse us with the same urgency that drew thousands to Selma, the same potency that fueled the abolitionist movement, and the same conviction that drew people like Gunnar to the resistance – something capable of cutting through the haze and quieting the noise. Ironically, this moment, this day, might be precisely what’s needed to help us get our “fight” back.
“With This Faith…”
And the Germans trouped in the 9th of April, 1940. They needed barely 800 soldiers to take Oslo. Yes, about twice as many people as are sitting here. In a war, you have to figure out if you want to accept the situation you’re in, and embrace what’s going to become your new reality – or stand up against it and thus risk everything.
That’s how Gunnar described the choice they faced at that time and in that place. It’s the same choice facing us here and now, and what RFK was speaking to when he said we Americans must ask ourselves “what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in.” We have to decide whether we’re going to accept the situation we’re in, and embrace what’s going to become our new reality, or stand up against it – and thus risk everything. The latter involves three commitments. Remember the environmental adage, “reduce, reuse, recycle”? We need to “resist, redress and restore.
Resist. When government agencies target economic refugees, people they call “illegals”, we keep them safe and stand with them as they fight for their inalienable rights, recognizing that, as Martin said, “Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.” We get aid to everyone who needs it, and especially to groups on the ground, doing what’s necessary to help the already oppressed and marginalized survive a harsher reality – even when those in power make doing so illegal.
Redress. If, between now and the 2026 election, members of Congress have not shown themselves to be unequivocally for a society that works for all of us, we oust them. Every single one. Right now, they’re concerned about the “wrath of Trump.” We make them concerned about the wrath of the people. We pave the way so that economics is no longer a prerequisite to taking a turn at public office. And when our government allows corporations to run roughshod over the poor, we hold them accountable, and if they don’t stop, we take away the thing they need most – our support.
Restore. When they try to tell us that only some of us matter, only one group has the truth, or that there’s a higher source of authority than our conscience, we reject it. We jettison race, racism and racialism. We commit to humanizing the struggle, bringing humanity, consciousness and heartfulness back to every social space. We make justice equal by building apps that make real-time legal representation available to everyone and allow everyday citizens to hold legal authorities accountable. We make bail available for people trapped in jail and make it economically feasible for poor people to serve on juries. We repair what we’ve broken.
There’s something quite remarkable about the fact that each of us gets to shape our collective fate, to not just the beneficiaries of those who came before us but potential benefactors to those who come after. So, like Gunnar, we never stop telling the important facts. And like Martin, we never forget how the inescapable network of mutuality and the single garment of destiny work.
The alternative to who we can be at our best, a nation that’s true to the virtues that birthed it, is and has always been, a harsher, harder and more disconsolate land. One where lives of beauty and diversity are never allowed to flower, where the land of opportunity becomes the land of opportunism, and where the hope that once blazed the sky no longer breaks the horizon.
Granted, on this fateful MLK Day, it may feel like this is where we’re headed. But we also don’t have to stay the course. Because, though some envision this as a memorial for the dream, they’re as mistaken today as they were when they declared the dream dead. Turns out, it was anything but. “With this faith,” Martin said, as he neared the conclusion of his most famous speech – I Have a Dream:
…We will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day. And this will be the day – this will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning: My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring! And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.
Let’s recognize that for the next four years, this, carrying the torch so many carried before us, and doing so for all those who’ll come after, is what MLK Day will be about. We’ll no doubt discover that our humanity itself is under vigorous assault. But that’s okay. Because this is our fight to win. It always has been.
If we can recognize the moment we’re in and act accordingly. If we, like Gunnar, Martin and so many others, can set our hearts and commit ourselves to the struggle, we’ll be met in this moment. We’ll realize that the arc of the moral universe really does bend toward justice and that what we’re witnessing isn’t the ending of the dream but the fulfillment of it.
It’s high time we got our “fight” back.
—
The song I’m closing with today, Dion’s Abraham, Martin and John, holds personal meaning for me. I can still remember the commemorative painting of JFK, MLK and RFK on the wall of my childhood home. I remember how much Mary, the grandmother who raised me, loved those men, and how, whenever this song came on the radio, she’d stop whatever she was doing, sit down, and listen. Long before the rest of us, she’d created her own MLK (and JFK and RFK) Day ritual. Then, she went right back to the work. Let’s do the same.
(Access additional 2025 MLK Day materials here.)
The Mary Moore Institute (MMI) will soon be launching efforts to raise funds — everything from t-shirt and book sales to soliciting major gifts — to support those close to the work and to help reinvigorate the movement. Because, as Gunnar put it, “Resistance work costs money.” But, a bit of money is all that’s standing in the way of those already in the thick of the fight. If you’re interested in being updated on how you can help, feel free to connect with me here (lettersfromabirminghamboy@substack.com) or via the MMI contact page at www.marymooreinstitute.org.