What Would MLK Do?

A call for peaceful protest—and a national walkout

Jan 20, 2026

This photo tugged on my heart today:

That’s Coretta Scott King kissing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. after his release from a Montgomery jail in 1958—almost a decade before he was assassinated.

I was struck by the look of love in his eyes. His almost giddy expression. The smiles behind him. The buoyancy of the moment.

It made me want to pray to this man—as a kind of patron saint of the United States. It made me want to hear what he would say at this moment, to this troubled nation.

No doubt, MLK would say: stay peaceful. Like Mahatma Gandhi, he understood that violence was not the answer—because violence serves to strengthen the grip of corrupt governments.

He would set the tone morally. He knew the Civil Rights Movement stood on higher ground and no pushing or shoving by segregationists could move him from that inner stance—even as our country denied and still, in many ways, undermines the dignity of Black people more than half a century later.

Maybe he would invoke a healing, spiritual framework through which to see our current heartbreaking fall from a grandiose self-image as “Leader of the Free World.”

Because no matter your news source, let’s be clear: when heavily-armed masked men swarm our streets, breaking windows and doors, forcibly dragging women, children, and men into shadowy detention centers without due process, we are no longer the land of the free.

Even amid the nightmare unfolding in Minneapolis, he would hold a higher vision—urging us to look beyond the present rupture and into the long time-body of history, to trust in humanity’s capacity to evolve.

More of us must do that now.

People are starving for meaning. We long to believe that not everything good, true, and beautiful will be devoured by machines—gobbled up and spat out by the morbidly rich feasting on the islands they own, behind the walls of their multinational corporations built on a false edict: endless profit, no matter the cost—even if that cost is a livable planet.

In the wake of World War II, nations forged a hard-won commitment to repair the devastation of that war, giving rise to a fragile international order anchored in a single promise: Never again. That promise is now threatened. (Can someone please tell the man occupying our White House that Greenland is NOT for sale, for god’s sake?)

The politics of cruelty, inflamed by the algorithms of outrage and the profitability of polarization, threatens to destabilize us all. We cannot let it.

We must return to the values embedded in our Constitution: that all people are born free, and that sovereign nations deserve the right to self-determination.

We must remember that human rights, codified by the United Nations in 1945, are still a relatively new concept—one that demands our daily tending or it collapses. We must learn how to honor every person’s inherent dignity, even if we detest their beliefs while, paradoxically, protecting against any belief that undermines human rights.

We cannot let what is happening in our country today blind us to Dr. King’s vision of the Promised Land—the one he spoke of so powerfully just three days before he was killed.