Were Martin Luther King alive in 2025 to celebrate his 96th birthday, what would he have to say about his nation’s contentious racial landscape?
Black Americans still face real inequities. Look at the huge numbers of crime victims, disproportionately black, generated by terrible progressive policies around public safety.
Or the willed decay of America’s public schools, once an engine of black social mobility: the erasure of all standards in order to conceal the failure of unionized teachers to actually teach.
Still and all, America is a far different place from the nation that saw King felled by an assassin’s bullet in 1968 at just 39.
We’ve seen a two-term black American president in Barack Obama and a black vice-president, Kamala Harris, who became her party’s presidential candidate — something King likely thought even his children would never see.
Black Americans routinely serve at the top levels of the Cabinet, on the Supreme Court, in the Senate as well as the House, as governors. Indeed, race is no barrier at the ballot box or to holding elected office.
Such progress surely would cheer Dr. King. It was a long time coming, and it came about because the civil-rights movement fundamentally transformed America’s sensibility.
Born in the churches of the South, the movement challenged America’s moral sense of itself. It did so through moral power, nonviolence, an appeal to faith, a call for civil disobedience of unjust laws and a plea for full equality.
King accomplished his goals not through coercion but by persuasion — and by demonstrating the all-too-frequent barbarity of those who sought to maintain injustice. It’s no wonder he entered the American pantheon for what he achieved in just 13 years on the public stage.
But he’d likely be dismayed at today’s America, and not only by the injustices that remain.
He’d be pained that while young black Americans are no longer barred from schools, they are too often denied a quality education.
We suspect he’d also be distressed by today’s discussions about race and the near-impossibility of honest dialogue and the insistence of too many on labeling any who disagree with them as racists.
He’d surely have cheered the passion of the Black Lives Matter movement — and equally surely have issued strong words when the group’s leaders turned the millions they solicited in the name of justice into their personal piggy bank and ignored the moral obligation to avoid violence that harms the cause.
A supporter of Israel, he’d be profoundly troubled by the abandonment of the Jewish state by many who were his allies and supporters — especially as antisemitism rages across campuses and the streets of America’s cities in the aftermath of Oct. 7, an event he would have been lonely in the vanguards of the left for condemning.
And he’d surely be pained that we have yet to fully realize his dream that people be judged solely “by the content of their character” and “not on the color of their skin.”
Indeed, obsessive racial grievance lies at the root of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion movement, branding whites as oppressors and blacks as eternal victims, incapable of achieving anything without active discrimination against whites (and Asians).
So we suspect King would have welcomed the ongoing collapse of the DEI infrastructure across corporate America and the Supreme Court victory against racism in college admissions.
For his was a universal message of equality and dignity for all: “Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.”
So we honor him for the goals he pursued and largely achieved — and for a vision the nation still strives to fully realize.
Yes, we nowadays forget the issues that made him even more controversial: his opposition to militarism; his denunciation of America as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
Ultimately, though, Martin Luther King’s legacy is that he managed to combat injustice by appealing to Americans’ highest aspirations. And that is why the nation rightly celebrates him today.
