ATLANTA: America has honored Martin Luther King Jr. with a federal holiday for nearly four decades yet still hasn’t fully embraced and acted on the lessons from the slain civil rights leader, his youngest daughter said Monday. The Rev. Bernice King, who leads the King Center in Atlanta, said leaders — especially politicians — too often cheapen her father’s legacy into a “comfortable and convenient King” offering easy platitudes.
“We love to quote King in and around the holiday. ... But then we refuse to live King 365 days of the year,” she declared at the commemorative service at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where her father once preached. The service, organized by the center and held at Ebenezer annually, headlined observances of the 38th federal King holiday.
King, gunned down in Memphis in 1968 as he advocated for better pay and working conditions for the city’s sanitation workers, would have celebrated his 94th birthday Sunday. Her voice rising and falling in cadences similar to her father's, Bernice King bemoaned institutional and individual racism, economic and health care inequities, police violence, a militarised international order, hardline immigration structures and the climate crisis.
She said she’s “exhausted, exasperated and, frankly, disappointed” to hear her father’s words about justice quoted so extensively alongside “so little progress” addressing society's gravest problems. “He was God’s prophet sent to this nation and even the world to guide us and forewarn us. ... A prophetic word calls for an inconvenience because it challenges us to change our hearts, our minds and our behavior,” Bernice King said. “Dr. King, the inconvenient King, puts some demands on us to change our ways.”
President Joe Biden addressed an MLK breakfast hosted in Washington by the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network. Sharpton got his start as a civil rights organiser in his teens as youth director of an anti-poverty project of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
“This is a time for choosing,” Biden said, repeating themes from a speech he delivered Sunday at Ebenezer at the invitation of Sen. Raphael Warnock, the senior pastor at Ebenezer who recently won re-election to a full term as Georgia’s first Black U.S. senator.
“Will we choose democracy over autocracy, or community over chaos? Love over hate?” Biden asked Monday. “These are the questions of our time that I ran for president to try to help answer. ... Dr. King’s life and legacy — in my view — shows the way forward.”
Elsewhere in Washington, Martin Luther King III attended a wreath-laying ceremony at the national memorial to his father. And Vice President Kamala Harris, the first woman and person of color to hold the office, spoke to volunteers at a day of service project at George Washington University. Thousands attended a memorial march in San Antonio. In Los Angeles, the Kingdom Day Parade returned after a two-year pandemic break.
Other commemorations echoed Bernice King’s reminder and Biden's allusions that the “Beloved Community” — Martin Luther King's descriptor for a world in which all people are free from fear, discrimination, hunger and violence — remains elusive. In Selma, Alabama, a seminal site in the civil rights movement, residents were commemorating King as they recover from a deadly storm system that moved across the South last week.
King was not present at Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge for the initial march known as “Bloody Sunday,” when Alabama state troopers attacked and beat marchers in March 1965. But he joined a subsequent procession that successfully crossed the bridge toward the Capitol in Montgomery, punctuating efforts that pushed Congress to pass and President Lyndon Johnson to sign the Voting Rights Act of 1965. (AP)
