Celebrating the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Tomiko Brown-Nagin is the dean of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School.
Like many of you, I continue to watch closely the events in Washington and across the country in advance of the transfer of power to a new President and a new Congress next week. As I wrote last Thursday, the attack on the Capitol was deeply disturbing. So too are the ongoing threats of violence against America’s democratic institutions.
Profound though these challenges are, they underscore the critical importance of our collective work to promote informed and reasoned engagement, and encourage broad civil discourse. And as we approach Monday’s holiday honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I know that I will draw strength in recalling the immense effort and profound sacrifice of previous generations who struggled to overcome injustice and advance equity.
It is also important to remember that King’s struggle is far from ancient history. Today would be only his 92nd birthday; King might still be with us, had he not been assassinated in 1968, when he was just 39 years old.
Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and a leader of the civil rights movement, King dedicated his short life to the pursuit of racial justice. He affirmed the inherent dignity and worth of every human being, envisioning a world where opportunity was not limited by race or economic status—a message as relevant today as it was in the 1960s.
In the long struggle to defeat Jim Crow, King was a powerful voice for nonviolent resistance, and he led many of the movement’s defining efforts, including the Montgomery bus boycott, the Birmingham Campaign, the March on Washington, and the Selma to Montgomery March. He and his fellow activists faced extreme violence, and they persisted.
In his last public address—delivered the day before his assassination—King famously said “All we say to America is, ‘be true to what you said on paper,’” calling on the country to live up to the principles enshrined in its founding documents. He recognized the obstacles we were then facing as a nation, but he believed that America could do better—provided that its people remained committed to the effort. “Human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability,” he told us in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, “it comes through the tireless efforts of men.”
I will bear these words in mind in the weeks ahead.
