Has America finally heard Martin Luther King Jr.?

WHEN PRESIDENT Ronald Reagan signed the bill creating a federal holiday honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., he warned that “traces of bigotry still mar” the country. This may seem the understatement of the 20th century; it would be an understatement today.

King spoke in his “I Have a Dream” speech of the “sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent.” This would not pass, he explained, “until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.” He said this on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial — not far from where armed insurrectionists this month tried to overturn an election decided, in part, by Black voters in Southern states who surmounted all manner of racist restrictions. He said it not far from the White House, where on the first day of June the president of the United States ordered the tear-gassing of peaceful protesters to clear his way for a photo op.

President Trump held up the same Bible from which King preached to send the opposite of his righteous message: exhorting governors to “dominate the streets” with troops to silence Black Americans, who, in their own summer of discontent, were crying out precisely against being dominated. The killing of innocent men such as George Floyd by police, the incarceration of so many more for minor offenses, the systemic neglect and disenfranchisement of communities of color even in an age when redlining and voter suppression are supposed to be illegal. These are the so-called traces of bigotry that continue to disfigure our country.

King exhorted nonviolence until his violent death, but still he declared the year of his assassination that “a riot is the language of the unheard.” He asked: “What is it America has failed to hear? . . . It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of White society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.”