MLK Day 2026

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My MLK King Jr. Day Essay

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This photo was taken on Liberation Saturday (November 7, 2020) when the news was first proclaimed that trump had gone down in defeat. The man waving the flag is perched above the front door of The Alabama, a 100+ year-old apartment building on Tiemann Place in #WestHarlem. His face and posture show the pure joy that so many of us around the country felt that day as we finally saw a promise of leaving behind the dark, dark Times of Trump. Little did the great majority of us suspect trump and the enablers of “The Greatest Lie” would return to plague us in 2024.

I think about the past a lot - I’m a historian after all - as a boy the future excited me. To be sure even then I could see struggles and a powerful ill wind blowing across the nation. JFK was assassinated when I was only five and I remember that sadness and confusion. In those days the television brought into the den of our house in #Bonlee stark images of wrong actions as police and National Guardsmen attacked peaceful African American protestors and their allies in southern AND northern cities. Burning crosses and hooded demons flashed across the screen. My Deddy was what today we’d call a News Junky and we talked through it all — as young as I was I was not given to turn away.

I’m glad for the points of view that he shared. I feel very, very fortunate for them. He respected those that sought public service so that the phrase “lying politician” was not an automatically uttered part of his vocabulary. He called a public figure on untruths in a heartbeat mind you, but he believed that there were those who truly sought to do good works. That meant that he talked about what people did and ideas that undergirded their acts. While he was deeply in opposition to what the Republican Party stood for all his life, it was not the politicians, or their followers, that he opposed but rather their ways of thinking and doing.

To be sure, with Nixon and then with the crook-mouthed Helms, Deddy, and many folks that thought like him had to do some hard thinking. Personally I had a tough time un-seeing some of the deeply wrong-headed and fundamentally inhuman worldviews I began to detect around the state and nation as I grew and studied and thought and fought.

But I digress. Deddy listened (and read) the words of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. I know that he respected Dr. King. He also greatly appreciated Jesse Jackson as he told me years later. In that terrible year when both Robert F. Kennedy and MLK Jr. were murdered (April 4 and June 6, 1968) I think the candle of my hope for the future flickered and faltered a good deal. But I was ten and much more time for kindling and fire-starting lay before me. Certainly that flame has nigh onto been extinguished in the years since. Nixon, Helms, Reagan — evil proxy wars in Central America — the resurgence of racism and xenophobia and the depths plumbed by both in our current times — voter suppression — unashamed white supremacy — attacks on women’s and gay rights movements for equality — the anti-education and critical thinking campaigns that seek to write a whitewashed nationalistic and untrue history — book banning — and the abandonment of constitutional democratic republican values in favor of authoritarianism and a cult of personality by fellow Americans. And yes. A modern brand of ideology anathema to our national experiment — fascism. All those evils have always been with us to be sure but recent trends have led us to MAGA and the mass unveiling and unmasking of so many — so very many for whom their dream of the future lay in the ugliest aspects of that collective past. I freely admit that the ill wind of MAGA has blown threateningly on my own candle flame of hope. It still does.

As the Snatch and Grab Gestapo rampages across the cities and countryside this January of 2026 taking actions few could imagine, certainly not of my Deddy’s greatest generation, themselves the snuffers of Hitler and Mussolini’s sick designs, threatening to end our own ongoing experiment in constitutional government that fire struggles to stay lit.

Reverend Doctor King quite literally had a dream of a future that learned from the past and rejected the wrongs of it. And he died for that dream. On the day that I took the photo above the flame of my own hope — so threatened with extinguishing over the years and most direly during trump — burned very bright. This was the case for me and my neighborhood and my best friends and lovers of constitutions and democratic republicanism.

Obviously, Dr. King’s work was born of the poison of slavery and the fight fought by millions of African Americans for generations for dignity, humanity, and freedom. Dr. King’s message also, and he was clear about it when he said, “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.'”

For that charge (and many others) Martin Luther King Day is not just for Dr. King - I don’t think it ever was, or men like Jesse Helms would not have fought so hard to keep it from coming into being. It is, rather, a day when flames of hope burn bright and those bearing those torches shine that light upon one another but also upon their foes so that they can see the bright light, and feel the heat, of so many with dreams that look forward not backward. Keep The Light Friends. Keep The Light.
 
If he said this today, he might replace "segregationists" with "nativists," but the remainder would not likely change.

“But they are balanced at the other end of the pole by the unregenerate segregationists who have declared that democracy is not worth having if it involves equality. The segregationist goal is the total reversal of all reforms, with reestablishment of naked oppression and if need be a native form of fascism.”​

― Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
 
We need to move this holiday to the fall or something. I woke up on MLK day 2026, looked out my window, and saw nothing but white.
 
donbosco said:
IMG_3031.jpeg

My MLK King Jr. Day Essay

&&&&&&&&&&&&&

This photo was taken on Liberation Saturday (November 7, 2020) when the news was first proclaimed that trump had gone down in defeat. The man waving the flag is perched above the front door of The Alabama, a 100+ year-old apartment building on Tiemann Place in #WestHarlem. His face and posture show the pure joy that so many of us around the country felt that day as we finally saw a promise of leaving behind the dark, dark Times of Trump. Little did the great majority of us suspect trump and the enablers of “The Greatest Lie” would return to plague us in 2024.

I think about the past a lot - I’m a historian after all - as a boy the future excited me. To be sure even then I could see struggles and a powerful ill wind blowing across the nation. JFK was assassinated when I was only five and I remember that sadness and confusion. In those days the television brought into the den of our house in #Bonlee stark images of wrong actions as police and National Guardsmen attacked peaceful African American protestors and their allies in southern AND northern cities. Burning crosses and hooded demons flashed across the screen. My Deddy was what today we’d call a News Junky and we talked through it all — as young as I was I was not given to turn away.

I’m glad for the points of view that he shared. I feel very, very fortunate for them. He respected those that sought public service so that the phrase “lying politician” was not an automatically uttered part of his vocabulary. He called a public figure on untruths in a heartbeat mind you, but he believed that there were those who truly sought to do good works. That meant that he talked about what people did and ideas that undergirded their acts. While he was deeply in opposition to what the Republican Party stood for all his life, it was not the politicians, or their followers, that he opposed but rather their ways of thinking and doing.

To be sure, with Nixon and then with the crook-mouthed Helms, Deddy, and many folks that thought like him had to do some hard thinking. Personally I had a tough time un-seeing some of the deeply wrong-headed and fundamentally inhuman worldviews I began to detect around the state and nation as I grew and studied and thought and fought.

But I digress. Deddy listened (and read) the words of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. I know that he respected Dr. King. He also greatly appreciated Jesse Jackson as he told me years later. In that terrible year when both Robert F. Kennedy and MLK Jr. were murdered (April 4 and June 6, 1968) I think the candle of my hope for the future flickered and faltered a good deal. But I was ten and much more time for kindling and fire-starting lay before me. Certainly that flame has nigh onto been extinguished in the years since. Nixon, Helms, Reagan — evil proxy wars in Central America — the resurgence of racism and xenophobia and the depths plumbed by both in our current times — voter suppression — unashamed white supremacy — attacks on women’s and gay rights movements for equality — the anti-education and critical thinking campaigns that seek to write a whitewashed nationalistic and untrue history — book banning — and the abandonment of constitutional democratic republican values in favor of authoritarianism and a cult of personality by fellow Americans. And yes. A modern brand of ideology anathema to our national experiment — fascism. All those evils have always been with us to be sure but recent trends have led us to MAGA and the mass unveiling and unmasking of so many — so very many for whom their dream of the future lay in the ugliest aspects of that collective past. I freely admit that the ill wind of MAGA has blown threateningly on my own candle flame of hope. It still does.

As the Snatch and Grab Gestapo rampages across the cities and countryside this January of 2026 taking actions few could imagine, certainly not of my Deddy’s greatest generation, themselves the snuffers of Hitler and Mussolini’s sick designs, threatening to end our own ongoing experiment in constitutional government that fire struggles to stay lit.

Reverend Doctor King quite literally had a dream of a future that learned from the past and rejected the wrongs of it. And he died for that dream. On the day that I took the photo above the flame of my own hope — so threatened with extinguishing over the years and most direly during trump — burned very bright. This was the case for me and my neighborhood and my best friends and lovers of constitutions and democratic republicanism.

Obviously, Dr. King’s work was born of the poison of slavery and the fight fought by millions of African Americans for generations for dignity, humanity, and freedom. Dr. King’s message also, and he was clear about it when he said, “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.'”

For that charge (and many others) Martin Luther King Day is not just for Dr. King - I don’t think it ever was, or men like Jesse Helms would not have fought so hard to keep it from coming into being. It is, rather, a day when flames of hope burn bright and those bearing those torches shine that light upon one another but also upon their foes so that they can see the bright light, and feel the heat, of so many with dreams that look forward not backward. Keep The Light Friends. Keep The Light.
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Well said.

Great photo on a great day in the city. I spent it with a loved one in the park. People were honking and hanging out of windows cheering everywhere. The witch was dead (we thought), there was a brief reprieve from the pandemic, and it was an unseasonably warm and sunny day. The world was settling back on the rails. Maybe my most memorable day in NYC.

I hope we see another one like it, sooner than later.
 
Sounds as if neither trump nor the white house have acknowledged MLK Day at all?

Not even feeling a need to fake it anymore. Completely without accountability.
 
Personally at this point I’m hoping he doesn’t say anything. Let him wear that stain among the rest.

And let’s see what black trump republicans have to say when asked about it. Always fun to see them squirm.

This second term continues to seal this buffoon’s fate in history, and that of his supporters and enablers.


*based on the above post, looks as if they did some math and chickened out
 
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