By Washington State Attorney General Nick Brown
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. saw America so clearly: both its flaws and its promise. But as we remember Dr. King today, we rarely see him clearly at all.
Like most kids in America, I first learned about a mythological Dr. King, rather than the real one. That’s not a criticism of my individual teachers. Racial injustice is not easy to explain to a child, and a sanitized narrative is easier for both kids and adults to digest. That’s part of the reason Dr. King’s work is often distilled in a quote that lands like a warm embrace: “I have a dream.”
We can easily understand Dr. King’s desire for equality for all Americans. Most people have expressed something similar. But Dr. King knew this dream wouldn’t become reality on its own. The urgent struggle for racial and economic justice relies on a fearless recognition of the true American history and collective action on multiple fronts.
Dr. King’s insistence on urgently working for justice was critiqued as impatience by many whites, even some who were sympathetic to his aims. In his Letter from Birmingham Jail, Dr. King rebutted this “strange, irrational notion that something in the very flow of time will inevitably cure all ills.” Progress is not guaranteed. That’s what makes the work necessary, and urgent.
My father marched with Dr. King in South Carolina and was arrested and jailed for participating in a lawful protest. His generation, which came of age in the Civil Rights Movement, knew progress is neither guaranteed nor permanent. This generation lived through Jim Crow and then saw it dismantled by the most ambitious federal actions for racial justice ever. Now, those who remain are witnessing a rapid backslide toward the past. The federal government is trying to erase Black history from government websites, museums, and schools. They already tried to take away Washington’s funding for public schools, housing, and healthcare research because of our state’s support for diversity, equity, or inclusion. In their desire to deny a painful past, they want to erase the progress won by the generations that lifted us to the present.
Fortunately, the civil rights victories that bent the rule of law toward justice are not easily brushed aside. They are helping this generation of Americans hold the line against MAGA’s volleys. We repeatedly beat the Trump administration in court to restore the programs and services Washington was promised.
The executive branch is not alone in its efforts to dismantle the progress for which Dr. King fought. The U.S. Supreme Court has gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act and continues looking for cases as pretext to dismantle it further through the convenience of selective originalism. The original amendments to the Constitution focused on what the government was not allowed to do to diminish our rights. But after the Civil War, the Reconstruction amendments empowered the government to proactively expand Americans’ rights. Few are as precious or essential as voting, which Dr. King called “the foundation stone for political action.”
Dr. King recognized that “a man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice.” But the reverse is also true. There is no greater purpose in life than doing the right thing. My sense of purpose is replenished daily by the work I share with people dedicated to making Washington a better state and part of a more perfect union. Every day, we engage the rule of law, built on the victories of the past, to protect people’s civil rights, their access to health care, environmental justice, and their opportunities to learn and work.
Injustice is a form of lawlessness, even when it’s codified. Today’s new rise of lawlessness in the federal government threatens everyone’s pursuit of freedom, not just the Trump administration’s most common targets. We must resist the urge to merely be patient for the next three years. Instead, we must be persistent.
Dr. King in his time shone a bright light on how America had fallen short of its founding promise. It made him controversial, and cost him his life. He’s far more popular now than he was
when he was killed. And if we fail to see Dr. King clearly, we also fail to appreciate and support those who practice his lessons today: people willing to fight for a better world in the courtroom, the boardroom, and in the streets. As children, we loved the idea of Dr. King’s dream. As adults, we understand how dauting a task he laid out for us. What keeps me going is not the dream, but the work we do for justice every day when we wake up.
