In remembrance of Dr. King’s life and work and all who sought to bend America toward justice. It now is up to us to awaken, act, and safeguard our people and our nation.
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On this day, as we celebrate the life and legacy of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. federal agents are erasing his legacy, targeting people of color, going door-to-door, dragging people from their homes, disappearing them; randomly stopping brown and black people in cars and on the street, brandishing guns, demanding papers, arbitrarily arresting citizens, flagrantly violating long-established constitutional rights, attacking witnesses with pepper spray, toxic gas and, in the case of Renee Nicole Good, claiming impunity while murdering a US citizen witnessing ICE’s chaos and brutality.
We have gone from “I Have a Dream” to We Have a Nightmare.
On December 10, 2014, in recognition of my efforts to create a cabinet-level Department of Peace, I was invited to be a keynote speaker at the King Center in Atlanta, in celebration of Dr. King’s receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, an honor he accepted with the belief that “…unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.”
His dedication to non-violent resistance, in the manner of Mahatma Gandhi, provided moral leadership for the civil rights movement dedicated to ushering in an era of equality, economic justice and educational opportunities, to emancipate not only people of color, but to release all humanity from the halters of hate, and to help us recognize our essential co-equality so that “We the People,” includes all of us.
Under the guise of enforcing immigration law, this Administration has commenced an ideological attack on everything that recognizes America’s diversity, the imperative of equality, and the fairness of inclusion.
We are witnessing a frontal attack on America’s capacity to meet the purpose of governance itself, as described in the Preamble to the Constitution:
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
The Preamble as interpreted by the current Administration is monochromatic, sows division, reeks of injustice, incites discord, misuses the military, pulverizes economic, educational and health care needs, assaults constitutional freedoms and would bequeath a nation indistinguishable from fascism.
Dr. King’s legacy wasn’t just about people of one race, it is about the social, economic and political rights of all of us.
In contrast, the Administration has attacked the Voting Rights Act with new voter ID laws, attempts to compel polling station closures, and attempts to scuttle mail-in ballots.
The federal government has defunded programs in public schools and universities designed to provide equality of opportunity. Funding for programs which recognize inclusiveness have been removed from every federal department. Universities and corporations have been successfully threatened or punished with sanctions or loss of federal contracts if they failed to align with a policy which, imposes historical blindness in name of color blindness.
Years ago, in Cleveland, our family which grew to nine members, had trouble finding rent. We lived in tenement apartments where our neighbors were mostly black. Economic inequality affects the living conditions of people, regardless of race. Was there resentment of blacks in our house? No. We could see we were struggling with the same conditions and we were united in our striving.
Today, nearly 8 million African Americans and 5 million Americans of Hispanic origin, and 20 million white Americans live below the federal poverty level. Wealth concentration in America finds the top 1% accumulating 987 times more wealth than the bottom 20%. In total, over 40% of Americans are low income or poor.
This Administration has sent soldiers to patrol our cities, and has flooded cities with agents who behave like gestapo. It threatens to takeover countries around the world, while proposing a $1.5 trillion budget for its newly named Department of War. This would amount to nearly three-quarters of all discretionary spending, widening the wealth gap and pitching even more Americans into poverty. This is an outrage and demands a broad civic response.
Instead of creating programs which can lift all Americans out of poverty, and which can protect America’s middle class from sinking into poverty, the Administration callously chooses to divide the country, appealing to grievance narratives, white identity and demographic dominance which can intensify anti-immigration and anti-DEI policies and cause people to lose sight of the federal government’s own responsibilities.
As a prelude to destroying the civil rights movement itself, the federal government has been removing the names and historic accomplishments of minorities from places of honor and recognition, like World Heavyweight Champion, Muhammad Ali, and Wilma Rudolph, three times Olympic Gold Medalist. Bayard Rustin, who created the 1963 March on Washington , Doris “Dorie” Miller, who was awarded the Navy Cross and Fannie Lou Hamer, noted voting rights activist, all erased per the guidance of the President, who ordered termination of traces of recognition for people of color, including Native Americans.
These actions were devised to insure disparities and oppression affecting not only race but gender equality.
In attempting to obliterate the teaching of civil rights history, the Administration has diminished the hallowed history of each and every group, regardless of color and country of origin, rejecting the journey of all those generations of Americans who had to overcome hardship and discrimination, were denied opportunities, placed in a desperate struggle and somehow survived.
Policies which take down the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 are a sinister remake of America in the image and likeness of a pre-civil rights era and perhaps even pre-Civil War America.
When Dr. King spoke of “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” that arc rose from the recognition of the evils of slavery, ascended in Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment which abolished slavery, and rose even higher with the 14th Amendment of Equal Protection under the law.
Each wave of immigration has challenged our nation. Each wave of immigration has enriched America, defined America as the place where paraphrasing Emma Lazarus’ words at the base of the State of Liberty, the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free risked their lives to journey to freedom, to America, a light of nations.
Yes, America has failed control its borders. Yes, America must control its borders. But the past failures cannot be cured by anti-immigrant policies which run so deep that the President himself, in shockingly racialized rhetoric — described one immigrant group as “garbage.”
Fear is on the ascendent as immigration is recast as an invasion. Radicalization is being normalized through online memes and orgies of anti-this and anti-that.
It is not “woke” to stand up for our constitutional rights. It is not woke to resist our cities becoming occupation zones. It is not woke to want to stop federal agents from asking for our papers, knocking at the doors, invading our schools, and our places of worship.
Today, in the Rotunda of the United States Capitol, an extraordinary sculpture of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., is in silent repose, a beautiful likeness, yet without arms and legs. – (Worthy of note is the other Rotunda statue depicting its subjects still bound in stone — that of the suffragettes).
Let us celebration Dr. King’s birth, his life, his sacrifice by being his arms, his legs, his heirs and heiresses challenging a government whose definition of America is fossilized, narrow, and disrespectful of an historic tradition which became the envy of the world for its pledge of one nation, “with liberty and justice for all.”
Let us, once again, mindful of our tempestuous history, blessed by our Constitution, take up the banner of the civil rights movement and rally the nation in defense of the social, economic and political rights of all Americans.
It is not “woke” to stand up for our constitutional rights. It is not woke to resist our cities becoming occupation zones. It is not woke to want to stop federal agents from lawlessly knocking at our doors. It is not woke to demand our government finally address rising economic inequality.
It is not “woke” to demand our government work for peace.
No, it is not woke, when the American people finally awake to the threat to the freedoms of all of us. In the 250th year of our Independence, let us remember where we came from. Let us remember how our freedoms evolved. And let us reject anyone who wishes to impose a government foreign to us and adverse to our freedom-loving nature.
Let us prepare, as did Bayard Rustin and A. Phillip Randolph in 1963, to once again March on Washington in a peaceful insistence of freedom and jobs. Let all of us who feel we are losing our nation converge on Washington to reclaim it, as did over a quarter-million Americans on August 28, 1963.
Let Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream,” speech delivered on that day, be read again to set the tone for reminding our government that we still dream of the America that can be and reject the nightmare being imposed upon us.
Dennis Kucinich is a former congressman who represented Cleveland, Ohio, in the U.S. Congress for 16 years. He can currently be found writing on his Substack, The Kucinich Report.
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