Statement | Martin Luther King is a model of hope just when we need it

On Monday we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day and inaugurate Donald Trump as the 47th President of the United States. It may seem like an odd pairing, especially to those of us who believe that Mr. Trump has fueled a culture of skepticism, denial and indifference to issues of injustice.

But if Dr. King’s life taught us something, it is that hope is most useful when the evidence runs the other way towards despair. Faced with dark times, hope points us towards something better.

Dr. King’s ministry took place in a country marked by segregation, an unpopular war abroad, and the widespread social and economic disenfranchisement of African Americans.

This is not 1963. But the troubled times many of us feel we live in make Dr. King’s message especially relevant.

The occasion for his “I Have a Dream” speech, the 1963 March on Washington, came in the wake of a long season of anti-black violence. In May of that year, anti-segregation protests in Birmingham, Ala., known as the Children’s Crusade, had been met with fire hoses, police dogs and batons. That same month saw an angry mob attack a sit-in that took place at a Woolworth’s in Jackson, Miss. In June, civil rights activist Medgar Evers was murdered outside his homealso in Jackson.

When Dr. King, in his speech, imagined that “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will sit together at the table of brotherhood,” that dream served as an alternative to today’s bloody and depressing reality.

Dr. King did not run from this evil or deny its reality, but neither did he let discouragement have the last word. “I refuse to accept despair as the final answer to the ambiguities of history,” he said during his acceptance in 1964 speech for the Nobel Prize. “I refuse to accept the idea that man is a mere float and jetsam in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events that surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war, that the bright dawn of peace and brotherhood can never be a reality.”

He looked at his present reality and dared to defy it.

Dr. King was driven by a vision of peace between God and humanity outlined by the Hebrew prophets in the Bible. The hope he turned to was first forged in the black church tradition of his youth. This tradition often had to rely on divine help because it had no political or economic power.

In the same Nobel Prize speech, he said: “I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and non-violent redemptive good will proclaim the dominion of the land.”

Our problems now in the United States are not the result of one election. The past decade or so of American life has seen an endless parade of mass shootings, racially motivated violence, economic instability, and wars in Israel, Gaza, and Ukraine, in which innocent civilians have suffered.

Talking about the problems is not the hard part. Much harder is finding the strength to believe that there is hope beyond our jeremiads. Despair has never set anyone free.

I am still inspired by Dr. King’s witness, but I don’t believe we can just borrow his dream. It is not enough for someone sitting in the rubble of 1963 to outline a vision that helped create the more just world in which we live. We need someone who has picked his way through the partial ruin of recent years to deliver a new word.

We need more people with the courage to say that we don’t need to see the foreigner as a threat, but instead as a bearer of God’s image. To see the struggles in our cities for what they are, not as a means to change the subject. And to recognize that rural America is more than a place where anger and voices can be whipped up—it needs revitalization.

We cannot push suffering onto others without it returning to us. Our world is connected, whether we want to recognize it or not. We can’t build walls high enough to wipe out the world’s problems, but we can reach out far enough to make a difference in the lives of those who are hurting.

Dr. King is a model through hope itself. It is his great gift to us. We honor him well if we remember that the third Monday in January is still for the dreamers.