Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream is still under attack. Nonviolence is the antidote | Opinion

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a revolutionary. He envisioned nothing less than the still-radical dream that the barriers erected by decades of slavery, economic isolationism and violent oppression will be torn down and replaced by doors of liberty, open to each and every person in the United States of America.

Revolution is in the air again these days — freshly and horrifically in the brutal coup attempt of Jan. 6, 2021. The criminals who invaded the U.S. Capitol were intent on overthrowing our nation’s most cherished democratic institutions and subjecting the majority to a tyranny of violent insurrection.

By contrast, King and the civil rights movement he was the face of sought to reform our institutions and national character from within — a bloodless coup for vastly more noble ends.

King articulated his strategy for change while writing about the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s plans for the extended Poor People’s Campaign rallies in D.C. during the spring of 1968:

“We decided to go to Washington and to use any means of legitimate nonviolent protest necessary to move our nation and our government on a new course of social, economic and political reform.”

Before he could lead those six weeks of demonstrations, King was assassinated. And for those who know his legacy only by its loftiest images — the soaring oration, the heroic photos of brave marchers and resisters — it’s easy to forget that King was a ferociously reviled figure in his time, his life threatened nearly every time he stepped into the public eye.

Today, the putative leaders of the Republican Party have caved in to election-denying MAGA extremists, intent on pushing democracy to the brink of collapse. It’s a theatrical, unserious movement that feeds off a toxic stew of white male grievance, conspiracy theories and revenge politics.

That’s all the more reason that as we honor King’s birth, we should realize with fresh eyes that his legacy — what he stood for, valued and promoted — is the only antidote to the moral sickness that pervades our current politics.

Yes, King had his personal flaws. He also might be the most scrutinized American leader of all time. For years, FBI agents spied on him relentlessly. Even before his assassination and other attempts on his life, he endured repeated harassment by police in his home state of Georgia and throughout the South. During his long struggle against racial segregation and for voting rights, he was arrested more than two dozen times.

But unlike our modern would-be revolutionaries, who seem defined by the objects of their hatred, King made his values — his dream — clear. At the core of his moral belief system was nonviolence. As he often preached, its goal is to defeat injustice and systems of injustice — not people. The nonviolent approach is to win over opponents to friendship, not to humiliate or defeat them, but to bring out the good inside them.

Like Mahatma Gandhi, who deeply influenced him, King’s message of love could not be dismissed easily. His work, including the 1963 March on Washington, helped bring about the landmark Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

Today, we can’t pretend the hard-earned results of that work are settled and etched in stone. The arch-conservative majority on the Supreme Court has decided we no longer need the protections of the Voting Rights Act. Newly-emboldened legislatures in states such as Missouri are actually revoking the most personal of individual liberties. Cynical, reactionary politicians twist cherry-picked King profundities into Kumbaya Sunday school platitudes, while passing laws that ban schools from teaching fundamental truths about this country’s history of racism and oppression.

King was a revolutionary and a peacemaker, someone who believed in the power of righteous resistance, not the power of armed insurrection. Though some of his followers gave into despair, or a belief in fighting fire with fire, King maintained his core philosophy of peace and calm in the face of violent hatred.

If we take one lesson from the blood and tears of the civil rights era, and from King’s resolve in the face of furious opposition, it’s that achieving true justice requires one absolute commitment: All human beings must be equal in the eyes of society and government alike.

And while tolerance of our differences is key to attaining that goal, that never means we can forgive or — worse — look away from intolerance.

We have far to go before we realize the world Martin Luther King Jr. dared us to dream about. This holiday reminds us we must never quit reaching.