Categories
NewsStreet Scribe

Donald Trump’s Inauguration Jan. 20 Will Fall on MLK Day

[cutline] Donald Trump is sworn in Friday, Jan. 20, 2016. Official White House photo by Grant Miller.

When Donald J. Trump is inaugurated as president on Jan. 20, millions of Americans will be commemorating the life and legacy of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Here in Athens, MLK Day events will begin downtown at the historic “Hot Corner” area that has long been a center of African American history, commerce and entertainment in this city. For more information, see aadmovement.org or Calendar Picks.

King was a leader in the struggle for racial harmony and international peace whose 1968 murder in Memphis sparked a long campaign for a holiday in his honor. Finally, in 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill making the third Monday in January a national observance of the birth of the civil rights firebrand. The holiday was first observed nationally on Jan. 20, 1986, though local marches in support of the observance had been held in Athens, Atlanta and many other cities for years before MLK Day was made official 38 years ago.

Today the King holiday has evolved into the Martin Luther King Jr. National Day of Service, when organizations and individuals perform worthwhile work to improve their communities. John Lewis, a longtime Georgia politician and a youthful disciple of King, worked to make the MLK holiday a time of national service, and his efforts came to fruition in 1994.

The courage and commitment of King and his thousands of unsung allies changed the Jim Crow South and inspired the world. “The 1964 Civil Rights Act was the best thing that ever happened to the South in my lifetime,” recalled former President Jimmy Carter, who died at age 100 on Dec. 29.   

Three years ago, in the Jan. 5, 2022, edition of The New York Times, Carter wrote a warning to his fellow Americans headlined “I Fear for Our Democracy.” Writing a year after a Trump-inspired MAGA mob of insurrectionists stormed the Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, Carter said, “I now fear that what we have fought so hard to achieve globally—the right to free, fair elections, unhindered by strongman politicians who seek nothing more than to grow their own power—has become dangerously fragile at home.” 

In the column, Carter decried America’s current disunity. “Promoters of the lie that the election was stolen have taken over one political party and stoked distrust in our electoral systems,” he wrote. 

If he were alive today, Martin Luther King Jr. would probably join Carter’s clarion call to preserve the ideals of the American democratic republic from the plunder and plutocracy of a home-grown authoritarian regime. “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity,” King wrote in 1963. His words still hold true today.

Both King and Lewis are the subjects of new biographies published just in time for this year’s MLK Day observances. King: A Life, by Jonathan Eig, is a lengthy but readable biography that became a New York Times bestseller and a winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize. Davis Greenberg’s John Lewis: A Life is a definitive biography of the footsoldier for freedom in the 1960s who went on to become “the conscience of Capitol Hill” during his years of service as a United States congressman. 

Over a span of decades I have attended many events in Athens, Atlanta and Washington, DC  commemorating King’s life and legacy. In 2003 I flew to the nation’s capital to document with pen and camera a colossal peace rally that took place there on MLK Day two months before the Iraq War began. Marchers assembled on the Capitol lawn, but there was no damage to the venerable building during the peaceful event. 

Six years later I was again in Washington when history was made on MLK Day there. On Jan. 20, 2009, President Barack Obama was inaugurated during the King holiday. I was in the press area on Capitol Hill as some 2 million citizens attending the inauguration felt King’s spirit on MLK Day. To see my photographs from those events, visit my website at edtant.com.

As Donald Trump returns to the White House on MLK Day, King’s words still resonate: “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”

RELATED ARTICLES BY AUTHOR