History will not forget what it refuses to unite

On February 12, 2025By Littum

In the first months of 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. something he rarely let himself do – He stepped away. He and his wife Coretta together with Bernard Lee and Dora McDonaldwithdrew to the hills of Ocho Rios, Jamaica. No phone. No press. No urgent banks on the door. For the first time this year, King was alone with his thoughts, unloaded by the constant demands of speeches, marches and negotiations.

This was not free time; It was preparation. King’s last book – “Where are we going from here: chaos or community?” – would be a short for a country in war with its conscience. He understood the weight of the movement, the movement. For a month he was not the leader – only the author. He worked over the words and came together the questions that would haunt a nation long after he was away.

And then the summer came and America burned.

All over the country cities broke out – NewarkAt Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis. In everything 158 Uprights were alternately labeled riots, rebellion, turmoil and disorder. King saw it coming. Three months before the Newark and Detroit turmoil, he stood at Stanford University and warned about the fire ahead. “All our cities are potentially powder barrels,” he said in his speech, “The other America. ” But he was careful to add, “I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air.” They are born of something deeper – something raw, unresolved. They come from the slum and the separated schools from a people If work built the land But whose life is seen as one -time. “All these things,” said King, “has led to a great deal of despair and a great desperation, a great disappointment and even bitterness in the Negro communities.”

The author, CEO of Embrace Boston, stands by the embrace sculpture at the Boston Common. (Robin Lubbock/WBUR)

Twenty -eight years later arrived another January, and Donald Trump was sworn to office the same day reserved to honor King’s inheritance. The symbolism was unmistakable, accompanied by a campaign-not a whisper, but a roar-it was a fully limp promise to roll back the gains that King and his contemporaries had fought for.

Almost instantly moved Trump administration with purpose. The movements of changes were not new but familiar – echoed by a former America clapping back. Policies disassembled, the protection deleted, the displacement of what had hardly been built. One of the first goals of the administration was an order that was first signed by earlier President Lyndon Johnson on September 24, 1965. Ice cream followedsweeps through neighborhoods with “Blue cities. “Diversity initiatives? Marked as reverse racism. Black progress? Frozen in time. Doing America great again was never a promise – it was a return, a rolling back, a demand that the country give even justice to everyone.

And none of this was improvisation. It was a plan.

It was recently reported that nearly two -thirds of Trump’s executive orders were derived from Project 2025. At its core, Project 2025 is a restoration plan – the restoration of uncontrolled rule, by the government, which is unloaded by equity, of an America where justice is as exclusive as Country Club membership. This is America as it always has been, and slides out of the costume of progress and returns to its natural state. It is the same America that met reconstruction with Lynch Mobs, who answered desgregation with violence that saw the fire in 1967 and chose prisons rather than justice. It’s the same America that in 2020 looked at George Floyd Ask for breathing under the knee of the state, listened when he called to his mother and felt nothing but impatience. Temporary shame. Transactional calculation. And the troubled certainty that the story, considering enough time, could be rewritten, that the knee was not really on his throat, that he was not really murdered, that the problem was not the violence, but those who dared to object to it.

America chooses in politics and in power that is allowed to dream.

In 1967, King asked a question: Where do we go from here? Chaos or community?

For decades, America has answered with evasion with mythmaking with the desperate hope that the story will forget what it refuses to unite. We have seen black power diluted to see, reduced to representation without redistribution, presence without authority, visibility without justice. We have seen the illusion lasted for a while – seen as the symbols of progress were wrong for its drug as the election of a black president was not treated as a milestone but as a endpoint.

And when the illusion breaks – when the mask of racial progress – America slides back into an overly familiar pattern. Its fear is stooked. That panic. It criminalizes. It returns the clock.

King warned us about what would happen if America did not choose society. And now that stands at the edge of another Trump Presidency, we face this election again – not in rhetoric, not in hollow memory, but in real terms.

America chooses in politics and in power that is allowed to dream. America chooses what it allows and punishes, in what it remembers and erases. We now see that it does not choose solemn reflections on King’s words. It does not choose tribute or memorial coins in carefully curated programming of Black History Month.

So what do we need? We need places where democracy is not only discussed but lived where people do not gather like strangers, but as neighbors, bound by something deeper than transaction. We need block parties where the music is spilling out on the sidewalk, where the elders sit in lawn chairs and swap stories, while the children weave between folded tables stacked with aluminum trays of delicious homemade food. We need community grill where barbecue smoke rises as an offer where people who do not speak politics still talk about the neighborhood, if child just entered college, about which street needs to solve, about the things that hold Us together, even when the world tries to pull us apart.

We need Bowling Leagues and Bams FestsChurch basements and Christmas marketsEaster egg hunting and Embrace ideas festivalsRotating clubs and RoxFilmsBarbershops, and Boston while black – Spaces where democracy is not a sight, but a habit, a thing that is practiced in the usual, in the relaxed, in the slow, stacking work of belonging to each other. We need an investment in social infrastructure, not only on roads and bridges, but in the human architecture that holds a nation together.

Democracy is not self -supporting. It requires a trend, regular maintenance and a place to be practiced beyond the ballot. It requires calm, patience, a steady hand and clarified optimism. And above all, we need what we always need – community. Not as nostalgia, not as metaphor, but as a foundation, as the only real answer to the question of who we are and who we can still become. Choose Society, Select Democracy.

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