5 Lessons From Martin Luther King Jr. To Apply To Trump’s America.... His lessons went far beyond “I Have A Dream.”

01/15/2017 11:36 am ET

Trump’s win and America’s divisiveness have left some Americans feeling hopeless ― but this country has reckoned with this kind divisiveness before. We’ve gone through Civil War, after all. And Reconstruction. And those decades of Jim Crow that gave way to what we know today as the Civil Rights Movement, an era that more and more feels eerily similar to the one we’re living in today.

Dr. Martin Luther King

Since his assassination in 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. has gone from being an ordinary man fighting for a righteous cause, to a man who has become as synonymous with the American story as the founding fathers. The memory of Dr. King has been used as a shorthand for morality. 

But also, Dr. King’s legacy and what he stood for has been watered down, oversimplified, and appropriated to justify the very things he fought against. His words have been twisted in order to denounce the Black Lives Matter movement, and bolster anti-transgender bathroom bills. 

No one can really presume to know how Dr. King would have actually felt about the current state America were he still alive, but what one can do is make healthy assumptions based on the life he lived, and the things he said. Martin Luther King likely would have been horrified by Trump’s America. 

As Trump’s inauguration looms closer and closer, landing just a day after we celebrate Dr. King, what we should actually take away from his legacy are not the sanitized platitudes about “peace and equality,” but the burning fire for change and most of all action that made Dr. King the great leader that he was.

His lessons went far beyond “I Have A Dream.” 

1. This is not normal.  

We cannot settle into a false sense of complacency and accept the next four years as our “new normal.” In 1964, Dr. King wrote about the dangers of electing Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater, and his words are eerily resonant today. “While not himself a racist, Mr. Goldwater articulated a philosophy which gave aid and comfort to the racist,” King said. “His candidacy and philosophy would serve as an umbrella under which extremists of all stripes would stand.” Goldwater lost to Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, but today, we’re living in the reality that Dr. King warned against. What we should take away from King’s words, then, is that there is possibly even more at stake today than there was back then.  more