On MLK Day, lets celebrate this hero for what he believed in

Were Martin Luther King alive in 2025 to celebrate his 96th birthday, what would he have to say about his nation’s contentious racial landscape?Black Americans still face real inequities.Look at the huge numbers of crime victims, disproportionately black, generated by terrible progressive policies around public safety.Or the willed decay of America’s public schools, once an engine of black social mobility: the erasure of all standards in order to conceal the failure of unionized teachers to actually teach.Still and all, America is a far different place from the nation that saw King felled by an assassin’s bullet in 1968 at just 39. We’ve seen a two-term black American president in Barack Obama and a black vice-president, Kamala Harris, who became her party’s presidential candidate — something King likely thought even his children would never see.Black Americans routinely serve at the top levels of the Cabinet, on the Supreme Court, in the Senate as well as the House, as governors.

Indeed, race is no barrier at the ballot box or to holding elected office. Such progress surely would cheer Dr.King.

It was a long time coming, and it came about because the civil-rights movement fundamentally transformed America’s sensibility. Born in the churches of the South, the movement challenged America’s moral sense of itself.It did so through moral power, nonviolence, an appeal to faith, a call for civil disobedience of unjust laws and a plea for full equality.King accomplished his goals not through coercion but by persuasion — and by demonstrating the all-too-frequent barbarity of those who sought to maintain injustice.

It’s no wonder he entered the American pantheon for what he achieved in just 13 years on the public stage.But he’d likely be dismayed at today’s America, and not only by the injustices that remain. He’d be pained that while young black Americans are no longer barred from schools, they are too often denied a quality education.We sus...