Opinion| From King to Trump: The Collision of Legacies on MLK Day 2025

Very few Americans (of any demographic) would be able to draw many positive similarities between 2024 President-elect Donald J. Trump and the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Yet, on January 20, 2025, the legacy of the two notable historical figures will be entwined in American history.

In August 2024, Trump compared supporters of then-President Donald Trump, who attacked the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021, to the crowd of peaceful protestors who gathered at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August of 1963, claiming that more people attended the riotous “stop the steal” rally than witnessed King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in person. Meanwhile, in 2025, on the 39^th celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Donald J. Trump will be sworn in as the 47^th president of the United States, seemingly again imposing himself on the legacy of the fallen civil rights icon.

Many Americans, post Barack Obama presidency, questioned the outcome of the 2024 election, likely asking, “How did the nation that produced Martin Luther King Jr. become the nation that fell so swiftly to ultra-conservative nationalism in fewer than 60 years after King’s assassination?”

The answer to this question lies where most do: history.

Martin Luther King Jr., according to a 1968 Harris poll, had a nationwide disapproval rating of 75% (Cobb, 2018). Nearly a third of Americans felt King brought his assassination upon himself (Edwards-Levy, 2018). The man arrested and convicted for King’s assassination, James Earl Ray, received letters of support, one of which stated: “The FBI classified him as a troublemaker. If you killed King, you did a good job, for he had it coming to him.” (Edwards-Levy, 2018).

Martin Luther King Jr. only recently became synonymous with non-violence. His commitment to civil disobedience and non-violent resistance has deified him to some in the United States, seemingly to the point that he has become a canvas for White Americans to project their various interpretations rather than a human being who took a definitive and militant stance against racial and economic exploitation. Over the past four decades, King’s rhetoric has been thoroughly reimagined. For example, the average American student (in my experience) has been told that Martin Luther King Jr. is the Christian one, the anti-Malcolm X, the “good’ one. Students focus on the quote from King’s “I Have a Dream ” speech (1963) that “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.” However, they overlook that a great portion of the “I Have a Dream” speech is a critique of racism and classism in the United States.

In that famous speech (or infamous, depending on whom you ask), Dr. King said that 100 years post-Emancipation Proclamation, Black Americans were not free and that the United States had not held to its Constitutional promises. King referenced “this sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent,” saying, “those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual” alluding to the audience that he understood the righteous anger that led to uprisings in Birmingham, Detroit, and Cambridge that year.

Black students are often told that Martin Luther King Jr. would condemn the uprisings of the Black Lives Matter movement and call for Black Americans to exercise patience in their struggle against oppression. However, to the redresser’s willful or accidental unfamiliarity with King, his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” calls for the exact opposite of patience.

This begs the question, how is it that a figure who drew such profound ire from White America during a lifetime of fiery rhetoric has, in his death, become White America’s moral whip to chastise Black Americans; a man whose response to human rights violations upsets White America’s affinity for law and order?

The same demographic of Americans who overwhelmingly disapproved of King’s militant non-violent resistance in 1968 and the ⅓ of Americans who approved of King’s assassination are the grandparents and parents of those who attended the January 6 riot that killed multiple police officers in an attempt to take back their country. They are seeking to take their country back from the rhetoric of King, who said, “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for the Negro,” in support of the passing of Affirmative Action. Consequently, we have witnessed the fervent rejection and dismantling of initiatives aimed at fostering racial and social equity, accompanied by deliberately misleading critiques of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in the Southern United States—the same region where civil rights activists, including King, organized many non-violent protests against racial and economic injustice.

On this 39^th annual celebration of Martin Luther King Jr., it is imperative for Black Americans to realize that the civil rights work of Dr. King was not complete upon his assassination in 1968, nor the election of Barack Obama in 2008. As Dr. King said, “We must accept finite disappointment but never lose infinite hope.” America cannot be great now nor in the future without Black Americans constantly reminding our country that we have not forgotten that “America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds,” (King, 1963) and Black America will not be silent until full payment is received.

Dr. Coiette P. Morton, is a lecturer in the Division of Social Sciences at Prairie View A&M University.

Sources:
Cobb, J. C. (2018, April 4). When Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, he was less popular than Donald Trump is today. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/04/04/martin-luther-king-jr-50-years-assassination-donald-trump-disapproval-column/482242002/

Edwards-Levy, A. (2018, April 4). In 1968, Nearly A Third Of Americans Said MLK Brought His Assassination On Himself. HuffPost. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/in-1968-nearly-a-third-of-americans-said-mlk-brought-his-killing-on-himself_n_5ac51373e4b0aacd15b7d37b

King, M. L. (1963). I Have a Dream. American Rhetoric: Top 100 Speeches. https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm