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This Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I had the honor of delivering the keynote address at the Wisconsin Capitol Rotunda for their 46th annual MLK Day celebration. It’s the longest-running MLK Day commemoration in the country.
Now, more than ever, America needs moral leadership like Dr. King’s. I tried my best to honor his legacy of truth-telling and highlight what we can learn from his life. I really put my heart and soul into writing this speech, reading everything I could get my hands on about Dr. King, and doing my best to present who he truly was.
But I also told some truths about the moment we find ourselves in and the work that will be required from each of us to navigate out of it. We’re approaching a new founding era, where each of us will play a role in deciding what kind of country we want to be. And we must all rise to the occasion.
You’ll find a video of my full speech above, and the written speech below. You can also stream the full ceremony on PBS Wisconsin’s website.
Feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts. I’d love your feedback! It’s because of you I’m having these opportunities. Thank you all!
Text Of My MLK Day Speech
I want to start by thanking Dr. Jonathan Overby and Amy Overby for tirelessly organizing the oldest official state celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day in America. 46 years. Give them a round of applause.
Thank you to Governor Tony Evers, First Lady Kathy Evers, and the other dignitaries I’m grateful to share the stage with. And thank you all for being here. It’s important.
Today, we celebrate Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. And this one is special. This celebration is taking place in a year that marks 250 years since America’s founding with the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It was a document that laid out ideals that Dr. King would give his life fighting for future generations to realize. The “self-evident” truths, that all people are created equal and are endowed with the right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
A promise we’re all still fighting to fulfill.
This is a day where we honor the life and reflect on the legacy of the icon that is Dr. King. It’s also a day when we watch certain federal officials share quotes from Dr. King’s speeches that directly contradict their ideology and oppressive actions.
I won’t name names, I promise. We’ll keep it civil today.
But I start there because Dr. King’s activism is often sanitized. While he lived by the creed of love your enemy, he was no less of a fighter. He was a peaceful warrior for justice. He spoke inconvenient, controversial truths. He, along with his generation of activists, forced America to reckon with its unjust contradictions by citing its founding principles.
This was a man of such immense courage that, despite repeated incarceration and violence, he remained undeterred. This was a man who was stabbed in the chest at a book signing in 1958, and he remained unfazed and calm. When he got to the hospital, doctors said if he had even sneezed, he would’ve died. Even when a sneeze away from death, Dr. King remained committed to the fight. He bore a cross-shaped scar on his chest for the rest of his life, a symbol of his faith and commitment to the fight for freedom.
This was a man who knew he was being actively spied on by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, and yet he persisted. He bravely stared into the face of the Jim Crow South and white supremacy and said enough is enough.
Dr. King was more than an orator; he was an organizer. He was more than a dreamer; he was a strategist. He was more than a believer in America’s promised ideals; he challenged America to live up to them. He had such a deep faith, a resilient spirituality, that guided his leadership and elevated everyone around him.
Today is not about platitudes.
This is a day where we get the opportunity to draw insights from Dr. King that we can apply in our ongoing fight to fulfill the vision of Dr. King’s promised land.
The theme of today’s event is the power of unity. What a profound, aspirational theme at a moment when we need it most.
I often wonder what Dr. King would say about our time. A moment where we have access to unlimited information, but live in an age of disinformation. A time where we can connect with anyone on the planet with the tap of a screen, and yet feel so disconnected. A moment where algorithms incentivize and monetize division. A moment where we’re the most economically prosperous nation on earth, and yet so many languish in poverty.
A moment where we’re achieving scientific and technological breakthroughs, but are taking steps back politically and culturally that would’ve felt unimaginable just a decade ago.
A moment where we can all watch the same video of what is objectively a horrific injustice and draw totally opposite conclusions. A moment where it feels like we have a crisis of empathy.
Although we’ve certainly been more divided than this, I mean, we have had a civil war, at times, it feels as if we have never been more polarized.
I’m not sure exactly what Dr. King would say about the times we find ourselves in, but what I do know is that he would tell us not to give up on our ability to change them.
He would tell us not to give up on ourselves. He would tell us not to give up on each other. He would tell us not to give up on this country.
But he wouldn’t whitewash this moment either. He would tell the blunt truth, as he did in his time. He would praise the progress we’ve made, but remain clear-eyed about the renewed setbacks we face and the work still left to do.
After all, the fight for equality is an inter-generational marathon, and it’s just our turn, as John Lewis often put it.
I’m too young to have witnessed Dr. King’s leadership firsthand. I was born 25 years after his life was taken. But his impact never died, and I gravitated toward reading about him as a kid.
As I became a teenager, something happened that changed my life. Just as Emmett Till’s murder galvanized a movement during King’s time, so did the killing of Trayvon Martin during ours. It was Trayvon’s death and the callousness of the media coverage that set me down the path of journalism. I was around his age when it happened, and I kind of looked like him. I had hair at the time, I promise there was a resemblance. I wore hoodies like him. I walked through my neighborhood like him. I felt it could’ve easily been me.
Sometime after, I picked up Dr. King’s autobiography. I read it at a time when Barack Obama was President of the United States, and anything seemed possible. That period crafted my worldview. A Black kid could grow up and be anything.
It led me down the path of leaving my job in tech to start a media company. I’ve been doing pro-democracy journalism for 10 years now, and throughout all this craziness, I’ve never lost my faith in people. That’s because Dr. King helped shape my optimism.
But I’m not gonna lie to you, in recent years, and particularly in recent weeks, my faith and hope in humanity have been tested. But in preparation for this speech, I started reading about Dr. King’s life again and his style of leadership. I picked up Jonathan Eig’s excellent biography on King and read as many pieces of King’s writing as I could. It helped me look at the long arc of history and revitalized me at a time when I needed it most. Because if Dr. King could keep his faith in his time, then so can we in ours.
It’s become clear to me that Dr. King’s worldview and style of moral leadership are what this country so desperately needs right now.
Dr. King’s combination of forceful truth-telling, relentless organizing, and message of non-violent love is the antidote to this insanity.
As a journalist, I’m also a student of history. With so many attacks on historic truth and a renewed debate about what kind of country we are, I think it’s more important than ever to reassert some of Dr. King’s truths here today and glean lessons from his leadership.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s life sits at a definitive juncture of America’s destiny. It was almost as if he was molded by a power beyond us, both fitted to the time he lived and equipped with the vision of a world he would never live to see. He was the leader we needed.
Human history has been defined by a great struggle between two types of leaders. There’s the divider, and the uniter.
The divider seeks to rip us apart by appealing to our darker impulses. They weaponize hatred and tell us to be fearful or skeptical of one another. These so-called leaders scapegoat and target the vulnerable among us. They’re demagogues who give people permission to be their worst selves.
The uniter tries to bring us together by, as Abraham Lincoln put it, appealing to our better angels. The uniters remind us there’s more that binds us than divides us. They push us toward our personal and collective greatness. They organize us behind a shared moral purpose. They help ensure the moral universe’s bend toward justice.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was one of those leaders. He believed in us. He believed in humanity’s capacity for good. He believed in what he called the “great decent majority.” He believed that we could be shown a better way. He believed in a country that didn’t believe he deserved equal rights.
His optimistic message of nonviolent love in the face of hatred was a force of nature so fundamental to the human spirit that it moved the hearts and minds of millions.
Dr. King believed in this multicultural experiment we call America.
King believed that anyone could buy into the idea and promise of America and be as American as anyone else.
The idea that anyone can make something of themselves. The idea that we’re all worthy of dignity. The idea that the Constitution should protect the rights of all people, not the privileged few.
Dr. King was a modern-day founding father.
Dr. King and his generation of freedom fighters took the language of the Declaration and Constitution and used it to make the case for Black liberation. Like Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln before him, Dr. King pointed out the contradictions in American society and used the founding principles to bolster his arguments for the urgent necessity of freedom.
Dr. King studied Gandhi’s tactics of nonviolent resistance. He read Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience. He learned about the true power of unity and later put it into practice.
He didn’t treat unity as a slogan. He utilized it as a collective force for change.
Dr. King knew that there was far more that united us than divided us. That the connective tissue of the American idea could bind us together.
Dr. King knew that the American people are like this choir - when our voices come together with a singular purpose, we can create powerful harmonies that reverberate through the walls of Capitol buildings. When Americans unite behind a common purpose, they have a unique capacity to change hearts, minds, and legislation.
In a time long before social media and the attention economy, Dr. King knew how to command the nation’s attention and channel it as a tool for progress.
And he did that repeatedly.
In Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, at the age of just 26, Dr. King was thrust into the center of the fight against racial segregation. After 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat, Rosa Parks of the NAACP would do the same. Claudette Colvin just passed away last week, so I would like to say rest in peace to her. The courage she embodied helped set off a movement. She lived until 86.
Dr. King was then recruited by Jo Ann Robinson, E.D. Nixon, and Ralph Abernathy to help lead the Montgomery Bus Boycott. As a pastor, Dr. King had already demonstrated his ability to move his congregation. Now, he would move this nation.
You see, Black people made up three-fourths of the bus riders in Montgomery. They knew if they withheld their rides, they could grind the buses to a halt and force change. They made a massive impact, and also a backlash.
Dr. King’s house was firebombed during the boycott. His wife, the great Coretta Scott King, was at home with their firstborn daughter, and thankfully, they were unharmed. They both kept going, committed to the movement.
The boycott lasted 381 days. The NAACP had filed a lawsuit that led to the Supreme Court ending bus segregation. While the boycott created social and economic pressure, the NAACP case, Browder v. Gayle, provided the legal means for change.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott made Dr. King world famous. But most importantly, it proved that segregation could be successfully challenged by organized, mass, nonviolent action.
The bus boycott inspired a grassroots movement that took on a life of its own. Young people engaged in sit-ins at segregated restaurants nationwide. Then came the freedom rides.
Ella Baker, James Lawson, and Dr. King guided student leaders like John Lewis, James Bevel, Diane Nash, Marion Barry, C. T. Vivian, and Bernard Lafayette Jr. into creating SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee).
Dr. King knew the power of unity and organizing.
Then, in 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama, Dr. King and Ralph Abernathy joined forces with Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth to unite the Black community against segregation there. They again used the economic tool of protests and boycotts to force action. Their peaceful protests faced violent police pushback.
Dr. King was arrested once again, but this time he did something powerful. He wrote in the margins of newspapers and sandwich wrappers and gave them to others who snuck them out of the jail. It was put together by his allies, widely published, and became known as the letter from Birmingham jail, a piece of writing that I consider up there with America’s most important documents.
It was in this document that Dr. King wrote one of his most important lines: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Dr. King also wrote, “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” Dr. King’s letter was a definitive philosophical and moral defense of the Civil Rights Movement’s strategy of nonviolent civil disobedience.
Dr. King was released, and he and his allies would garner meaningful victories in Birmingham, leading to the desegregation of local businesses.
With momentum as his back, Dr. King led the March on Washington that Summer and delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech” to a crowd of 250,000 people of all races. He united the people behind a message of hope.
President Lyndon Johnson later signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which federally ended segregation and banned discrimination in employment. A victory. Dr. King didn’t stop there.
In Selma, Alabama, Dr. King once again showed the nation what moral leadership looks like. The right to vote was being systematically denied to Black Americans, and Dr. King knew that democracy itself was hollow if millions were locked out of it. When peaceful marchers, led by organizers like John Lewis and Amelia Boynton Robinson, crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge on what became known as Bloody Sunday, they were met with brutal violence, batons, tear gas, and horses, all broadcast to the nation.
Instead of retreating, King and the movement responded with discipline, courage, and unity. Americans from across the country flooded Selma to stand together.
Selma shocked the conscience of the nation and forced action. Within months, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed into law, expanding democracy and proving once again that when people unite behind demands for justice, even the most entrenched systems can be changed.
And that is why Dr. King’s time has been widely considered by historians to be another founding era. An era where the audacious patriotism of the Black community forced America forward. It’s always been this community and those who chose to ally with us that have pushed America to live up to its promise.
It’s for this reason that I consider America to have had three Founding eras, not one.
There was the first founding with the Declaration of Independence. Then, there was Reconstruction after the Civil War and the end of slavery, where America momentarily sought to guarantee rights to those who had been unjustly deprived.
During Reconstruction, Black people began purchasing land and starting communities in larger quantities than in US history. They started voting, electing more than 2,000 Black officials, including 10 Black members of the US House of Representatives, and two U.S. Senators.
That short-lived period of racial progress resulted in profound backlash.
The “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy lived on, and Southern states began implementing Jim Crow laws, oppressing Black people. The sharecropping system entrapped former slaves. Political freedom of Black people was suppressed. Violence erupted. More than 4,000 Black people were lynched between 1877 and 1950.
Then, Dr. King and his fellow founding fathers and mothers of the 1950s and 60s pushed us to fulfill America’s promise. But once again, there was a backlash - resulting in the assassination of Dr. King.
But as a result of their work, America made slow progress over decades, culminating in the election of the first Black president of the United States, Barack Obama.
But then came the backlash. We’re still currently living within that backlash.
After the 2020 murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Elijah McClain, there was a moment of massive protest and a national re-education on systemic racism. Then, the backlash to progress intensified. In 2024, there was more backlash.
Now, there is an ongoing attack on what actually makes America great: our multicultural democracy.
We’ve seen rollbacks to fundamental Civil Rights protections under the guise of attacking DEI. We see power grabs and masked men in unmarked cars on American streets, racially profiling and harassing both immigrants and U.S. citizens alike. We’ve seen Americans, like Renee Nicole Good, killed by a federal agent.
We’ve seeing an attempt to roll back the progress of our multicultural democracy in an echo of the reversed gains after Reconstruction. We’ve seen attempts to erase and distort history in an effort to delegitimize the stories that prove how ordinary people have challenged and changed unjust systems.
This is what authoritarianism looks like.
But the American people have faced down authoritarianism before and won. Because oppression is a mask for weakness.
And I’m not just talking about our fight against Nazi Germany, in which Black people fought for freedom, then returned to a country that wouldn’t guarantee their own.
No, we’ve had authoritarianism here in America before.
The institution of slavery was authoritarian. The Jim Crow South was authoritarian.
And do you know what we did? We organized, unified, and defeated it. Throughout history, we have repeatedly refounded and redefined this country.
Now, we’re approaching a new founding era. A moment where we are once again debating the fundamental question of what kind of country we want to be?
And that’s the beauty of America. That despite who we were yesterday or even who we are today, we as a people have the power to decide who we will be tomorrow.
As Dr. King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But as history and King’s own actions make clear, the arc does not bend on its own. It bends when a united people are brave enough to push it.
We have so many more tools at our disposal. Now, anyone can look at their phone, press record, and spread truth to millions. We each have our own circles of influence. We can mass organize. Now, we are all leaders. And we must live by Dr. King’s example and not be afraid.
If the Civil Rights heroes could do it in their era, with far fewer legal protections, surely we can do it in ours.
If an 11-year-old Joanne Bland and a 25-year-old John Lewis could cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday, get back up, and keep fighting, then so can we.
If students could sit at segregated lunch counters, if ordinary citizens could face dogs and firehoses, if everyday people could risk everything in their fight for dignity, then so can we.
If Barack Obama could rise to the highest office in the land and never break under the pressure and racism he faced, then so can we.
And if Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. could climb to the mountaintop, envision a promised land, and unite the people of his time to push America forward, then so can we. And we will. It’s our turn. Thank you!
