The Search for Lessons in Trump’s Return on Martin Luther King Day

On Monday, America will observe both the birth of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose vision of pluralism, democracy and racial justice made him the most revered civil rights leader of the last century, and his return to the presidency. -vote Donald J. Trump.

The convergence between Martin Luther King Day and Mr. Trump’s inauguration will be celebrated by some; after all, Mr. Trump’s stunning political comeback boosted by remarkable gains in voters of color. It will sit uneasily for others who see Mr. Trump’s movement — fueled by nativism and a rejection of inclusion as a societal goal — as a backlash to many of the prescriptions central to Dr. King’s philosophy.

But for many, the unusual juxtaposition — only Bill Clinton’s second inauguration on Jan. 20, 1997, coincided with the royal holiday — may be a moment of reckoning for a country that has struggled since its inception between its ideals of equality and its divisions over race and ethnicity.

“It’s almost a gift from God,” said the Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II, who will mark MLK Day from the pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Dr. King once preached. “There can be a juxtaposition of vision.”

The convergence of celebrations comes at a crucial time for black leadership and its historic alliance with the Democratic Party, which Mr. Trump appears to be severing. The country is more culturally and racially diverse than in Dr. King’s day, and the marking of what would have been his 96th birthday (January 15) comes as black voters question what black leadership should look like in second leg of the Trump era, amid the nation’s displeasure over policies ostensibly intended to address racial disparities.

Americans had the opportunity to elect a black woman to the presidency for the first time. They sharply chose not to.

Still, Monday’s double bank holiday will unfold in ordinary ways. Services and service projects to mark MLK Day are planned around the country, as dignitaries and campaign donors prepare to pack the Capitol and the nearby Capital One Arena to watch a peaceful transfer of power in Washington that will contrast with the violent unrest four years ago.

Even the intrusion of presidential politics is not new. Since the first MLK Day was observed in 1986, the holiday, which is celebrated on the third Monday in January, has been used by partisans for their own purposes. That year, President Ronald Reagan, who initially opposed the federal holiday, used the most famous line in Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech to argue against affirmative action, a policy Mr. Trump also rejects.

“We want a color-blind society,” said Mr. Reagan in a radio speech, “a society that, in the words of Dr. King, judges people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

This appropriation and the grinding down of Dr. King’s rougher edges bothered Martin Luther King III, son of the slain civil rights icon, who attributed his father’s assassination to his embrace of “a radical redistribution of wealth,” not “riding the front” of a bus.”

“Dad has been used as a smorgasbord,” he said in an interview, calling the Republican invocation of his father’s dream of a society that judges its members solely by the content of their character an incomplete rendering of Dr. King’s views.

But the argument seizes the moment. While Mr. While Trump had overwhelming support from white voters in 2024, he also increased his support among voters of color, particularly Latino men and, to a lesser extent, black men. Among both groups, a new brand of leadership is emerging.

Representative Wesley Hunt, Republican of Texas, who is black, recalled seeing Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

“The message of being judged not by the color of your skin but by the content of your character that resonates very well with me,” he said.

“We are seeing a paradigm shift in the country,” added Mr. Hunt, 41, Providing economic opportunity and safer communities could bolster his party’s gains, he said, but Republicans will have two short years to show they’re serious or risk letting voters of color slip through their fingers.

Decades ago, Mr. Trump executed five black youths wrongfully accused of rape, and recently spoke out during his first term in the White House against four minority women serving in Congress, urging lawmakers, all of them American citizens, to “turn back” to their countries of origin. Such episodes have given rise to accusations that Mr. Trump is racist. Mr. Hunt was aware of the criticism, but he rejected the label.

He said Mr. Trump has shown him personal kindness and that the president-elect embraces Dr. King’s legacy. The congressman recounted a recent trip with the president-elect to Mar-a-Lago, where they sat on a plane together the entire way, watching James Brown videos and talking about Mr. Trump’s friendship with Muhammad Ali.

“If a guy is racist, does that happen?” asked Mr. Hunt.

Leah Wright Rigueur, author of “The Loneliness of the Black Republican,” said Monday’s MLK Day comes at a time when “the Democratic coalition is at its weakest point since the early 1980s,” precisely because the Democrats failed to address the social ills that Dr. King warned of, in particular, economic inequality.

If the coalition’s high-water mark was Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns, she said, when the Obama presidency ended, those voters were left asking, “what has Obama done for me, materially, in my day-to-day life?”

Part of the blame for Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss, Ms. Wright Riguer, lay in the campaign’s failure to explain why democracy is the best system of government for voters struggling nearly 250 years after the nation’s birth.

Dr. King, she said, had a fundamental belief in the power of political institutions and their ability to sustain democracy. The failure of recent decades to include the marginalized and excluded in the larger project of democracy is undermining these vital institutions.

“All these people on the ground already know that Trump is a racist,” Wright Riguer said. “They know he’s bombastic and over the top, that he’s anti-immigrant, but they’re also like, ‘Well, I’m really angry about my position in life right now.'”

Mr. Trump has a knack for speaking to not only people’s racial concerns, she acknowledged, but also their frustrations and lack of economic mobility.

Jonathan Eig, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography “King: A Life,” saw parallels between the civil rights leader’s final days and the views of Mr. Trump’s core voters.

“There was a resistance to sharing power,” he said, “and I think there was a backlash to the election of Barack Obama and a backlash to Black Lives Matter. We see that every day.”

Dr. King warned about it himself.

“As Negroes move forward toward a fundamental change in their lives, a certain bitter white resistance is growing, even within groups that were hospitable to earlier superficial improvements,” wrote Dr. King in 1967’s “Chaos and Community: Where Do We Go From Here?”

In the years since Mr. Trump left office in 2021, this backlash has only strengthened. Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions. Big companies have ditched their diversity initiatives. Mr. Trump’s incoming deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, has told business leaders that he plans to “go to war on the diversity, equality and inclusion, or DEI, culture.”

For Mr. Trump, this is nothing new.

In 1989, he said on NBC, “I think sometimes a black can think they don’t have an advantage or this and that,” but he protested, “I would love to be an educated black because I really think that they have a real advantage.”

More traditional black leaders in the King mold are up for a fight. Dr. King’s son, who now heads an initiative called “Realize the Dream,” said he has had conversations with other civil rights leaders about organizing divestment campaigns targeting companies that go back on their DEI promises.

On April 3, 1968, the day before he was murdered, Dr. King a sermon in Memphis that offered a direct assessment of a broken and despairing world. “The nation is sick,” he said. “There are problems in the country.”

As he prepared to take the pulpit at Ebenezer, Dr. Barber, a prominent activist helping to revive the Poor People’s Campaign, which Dr. King started that he had studied that sermon. His task was to celebrate the endurance of Dr. King’s message, but the sermon will also confront the incoming Trump administration. The temptation may be to ignore Mr. Trump’s inaugural address and giving frustration and backtracking from the fight for racial equality and economic justice, said Dr. Barber.

“Nothing would be more tragic,” said Dr. King in 1968, and on Monday Dr. Barber say the same.

“History has proven that extremism will only make the people rise up,” said Dr. Barber. “It won’t make people hide, back up, bend over. Injustice will always cause justice and those who believe in it to rise. It has always done that. It always will.”