Temperatures lay well below freezing as a crowd of more than three dozen people clustered in the shadow of Main Campus’ Bell Tower on Monday to mark Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Professors David Mindich, David Brown and Linn Washington from Klein College of Media and Communication delivered brief remarks. Then, attendees took turns reading lines from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s life began Jan. 15, 1929 in a two-story Victorian mere blocks east of downtown Atlanta. A brief, epochal 39-year life saw King become the voice of the Civil Rights Movement, embodying the principles of nonviolent protest and sparking the end of Jim Crow racial segregation across the South. An assassin’s bullet ended his life in April 1968. By 2000, governments across the nation and the world celebrated the Georgia pastor’s work the Monday after his birthday.
King delivered “I Have a Dream,” his most famous address in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28, 1963, to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In it, he put into words his vision for the society the Movement would build: A world remade, where racism and other bigotries would no longer mar humans’ ability to see each other clearly.
Two miles east of where King laid out his vision for a just America, Donald Trump on Monday articulated one of his own after taking the oath of office — and, in doing so, became the 47th President of the United States after four years as its 45th. In a half-hour inaugural speech and a blizzard of executive actions, the new president moved to end government explorations of racial equality and narrow the ranks of those who could count on federal authorities to safeguard their rights.
Africology professor Molefi Kete Asante led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at UCLA. His passion landed him a front-row seat for the march and King’s address.
“It was historic,” Asante said. “I was extremely happy at that moment, because we thought the revolution that was coming would bring about social justice.”
Support for King and his cause proved only temporary after the march, and collapsed altogether after his death, Asante said. He later became an architect of the Black Power Movement — and believes the rise of Trump proves his point.
Trump paved the road to the top of American politics with a series of racial controversies. In the 1980s, he ran an ad in The New York Times calling for five Black teenagers to be executed for the rape and bludgeoning of a Central Park jogger — and refused to backtrack after the accusations against them fell apart. He burst into the national Republican scene in 2011 by helping revive claims that then-president Barack Obama was born not in Hawaii but in Kenya.
And Trump’s first and third GOP campaigns focused on immigration — on who did and didn’t deserve to call themselves American. The second, his failed 2020 reelection bid, claimed U.S. New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker — a Black man — planned to “destroy” the suburbs with “low-income housing.”
Trump sparked controversies, racial and otherwise, on his path back to power. Yet he’s increased his support with Black Americans — especially men — every four years.
Much of Trump’s coalition comprises white people who don’t think other racial and ethnic groups belong in the U.S., Asante said. The rightward movement of Black and brown voters, he argued, arose from an explicit, deliberate campaign to delude and discourage Black voters — especially online.
“What you had in the African American community is confusion,” Asante said. “And you had this confusion deliberately.”
Those who advanced equality in politics haven’t always been full-throated believers in its tenets.
The presidents remembered for backing King’s vision in the 1960s are John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, said Temple Institutional Diversity, Equity, Advocacy and Leadership director Nu’Rodney T. Prad. Kennedy, before his November 1963 assassination, had called on Congress to outlaw many forms of racial discrimination; Johnson oversaw the bills’ passage while in office.
But that’s a shortened version of the link between the Movement and the politicians of the era, Prad said.
Both presidents belonged to the Democratic Party — at the time a fractious coalition of liberal northern urbanites, moderate working-class families and southern white supremacists bent on preserving the region’s system of racial division. To upset the latter posed an enormous risk to both presidents’ political futures, Prad said.
But Kennedy isn’t remembered as a reluctant reformer: When Prad would visit his grandmother in Montgomery, Alabama, the 35th president’s image sat alongside King’s on her mantlepiece.
“There was a perception that Kennedy was doing, you know, a certain type of thing,” said Prad, who participates in the annual reading of the Massachusean’s advocacy. “But there was a reluctance in what he was doing.”
Anti-Trump forces’ third — and likely final — campaign often used the catchphrase, “We’re not going back!”
Intentionally or not, it echoes a line from King’s speech to the March. “We cannot walk alone,” he declared. “And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we will always walk ahead. We cannot turn back.”
Yet the nation now finds itself in a familiar place: Gazing up at the Capitol stairs as the once-then future-president becomes the current chief — half the country tingling with excitement for an era of upheaval, half shuddering with dread.
Kristy Crocetto, a project coordinator for Temple’s Institute of Disabilities, argued that if King were here today, he’d greet the occasion by urging the country to unite around a shared sense of moral purpose.
“We need to think about [King’s] words and put aside our own ideas of what is right and what is wrong and come together for the greater good,” Crocetto said in front of Beury Hall. “And that’s what’s missing. So if we can try to do that in Dr King’s honor, that would be something I think he’d be proud of.”
The MAGA legions’ longings for a mythic past were most apparent in Republicans’ stance towards transgender and nonbinary compatriots — terms describing people who might not conform to the norms or categories of the gender assigned them at birth.
The odd preoccupation seems destined to continue with Republicans now in power. Among more than 100 first-day executive orders, Trump moved to end legal protections for transgender people in prisons, in the immigration process and in the military.
Fewer than 2% of Americans say they’re trans or non-conforming. That hasn’t stopped so-called red states from moving as one to bar them from their chosen sports leagues, bathrooms and medical care regimens.
The anti-trans campaign made few explicit references to race. In fact, Trump often targeted his messaging on the issue towards Black and Latino men. But gendered traditions often weren’t traditions at all. They were fantasies, accessible to only a privileged few — and wielded not just against the gay or trans, but against Black women and people living in poverty, saidender, sexuality and women’s studies professor Jason Shapiro.
“The breadwinner-homemaker idea only existed in the 1950s for a few white Americans,” Shapiro said. “Not at any other time in human history — including afterwards.”
Many conservatives might find a rollback of civil rights-era gains unimaginable. But the president’s early statements portend an all-out federal brawl with “woke leftism” — often a pejorative for experiments in racial equality and reckoning.
Utterly defeated and thoroughly exhausted, liberalism’s remaining advocates say they wonder just how far that fight might go.
“I’ve been teaching all day, so I’m very much in a Professor Persona; I don’t want to be too, like, doom-and-gloom-catastrophe,” Shapiro said. “But when I’m home, I am terrified of it and often going, ‘Oh my God — what could happen, and how quickly?’”
King’s assassination in Memphis, Tennessee, effectively ended the Movement. In the years to follow, Asante came to believe that its work left much unexplored, unredressed and unrepaired — including the unity between Black Westerners and the African continent. But recent trends in technology and culture hearten him: People of African descent are now starting to make common cause — and their work may repair much of what has thus far been left undone, Asante said.
“This consciousness is growing, it’s developing,” Asante said. “And I have a lot of optimism for the future.”
Bayleh Alexander contributed reporting.
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