MLK Day 2056

Somewhere amidst my grief for the events unfolding in Minneapolis, and the backdrop of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, I had a vision of a moment maybe thirty years in the future. I'm seated on a park bench beside a lake, tall buildings behind us. People walk around us — some with neural interfaces barely visible behind their ears. Teenagers glide past on boards hovering above the ground, and overhead, autonomous vehicles move silently through the air.

I'm talking to a young man — my adopted nephew, much in the way I related to Vincent Harding when he was alive. I imagine this beloved nephew of mine turning to me and asking me to explain why he should honor the life of Martin Luther King Jr., and I imagine channeling the radical love of Uncle Vincent when I answer.

"My dear young nephew, I have had the great privilege to feel a sense of proximity to Martin King. That proximity comes from having met and learned from people who were his friends — who laughed with him, ate with him, argued with him, marched with him, and loved him deeply.

"I am one generation removed from segregation. My parents attended segregated schools. They remembered Dr. King galvanizing their parents, sending adults and teenagers alike into the streets to endure tremendous physical brutality in the name of freedom. They were deeply moved by the power of his voice, the cadence of his speech, and the purpose to which he devoted his life. I suppose the proximity I feel to him is also a proximity to the pain of segregation and the lingering convulsions of racism that would continuously erupt in the country throughout my life.

"What you need to understand is that this man deserves honor among us, not just because of how many people loved him, but because of how deeply and beautifully he loved us. The depth of the grief that I witnessed among his friends — even forty and fifty years later — and the grief carried by all those he stood for, was the kind of grief you feel when you lose someone who you know fiercely loved you. You see, my beloved nephew, Brother Martin, as my elders called him, came to be at a hard time in American life. To love us the way he did, with that kind of commitment in the face of all the brutality arrayed against us, was a difficult thing. It meant facing almost certain death. He knew that.

"One thing I want to say, one thing that is important for you to hear, is that when I say he loved Black people, I mean all of us — not just the powerful, the middle class, or those with degrees. When his body lay at Sisters Chapel at Spelman College, the lines of mourners to see him, to say goodbye, felt endless. I wasn't there, but I can't walk down Auburn Avenue without thinking of what that day must have felt like. I can still feel echoes of that grief now. That kind of reciprocity of love doesn't happen often in leaders of any kind. The people who hated him, the people who wanted us to remain the permanent servant class of the nation, tried to get him to turn against us. They tried to pit him against our other leaders, they tried to discredit him, threaten him, but he wouldn't turn away from us — any of us. Do you remember the name Malcolm X? Brother Martin loved him and he loved Brother Martin. He had this dogged commitment to love that is rare to see."

"I thought they disagreed with each other," my nephew interjects.

"They did, but they loved each other too.

"Now, what you will hear, and what is often emphasized, is that he loved them too. Many of us found his love for them at once liberating and disorienting. Because it's true: he loved Black people with his whole soul and his whole life, but he also loved the people who meant us harm. This was indeed a remarkable feat, and was at the center of his theology, of his dogged following of Jesus. He saw their humanity even when they seemed hell-bent on losing it. But people often make his legacy about his love for them. It's this part that gets all the attention. And I think it's partially a reflection of their guilt. In some ways, I get it: most knew the brutality they were complicit in at a deep spiritual level, and it was hard for most to accept that someone, that Martin, could forgive. Would forgive. This, too, is a reflection of their guilt — it was unimaginable that we hadn't been plotting revenge for five hundred years."

"Were you? Your generation?" my nephew asks.

"Maybe some of us were. Who could blame them? I don't. But Brother Martin wasn't, and most of us weren't. We just wanted to be free.

"You probably heard about how hard things were in the 2020s. People looked at citizenship as though they belonged to a special club, and club membership back then mattered more than human belonging. Some of us were pushing against that. Before our human rights were a matter of fact, as they are to you, they were a matter of faith. We had to make them true. Our country, and many others, had not yet abandoned their imperial ambitions. We were still embroiled in a fight about what America was to mean, who it was for, and whether our most lofty ambitions of multicultural, pluralist democracy were possible. The meaning we gave to Martin Luther King Jr.'s life was wrapped up in how we saw ourselves as a country."

"That sounds exhausting," my nephew says quietly. "Two griefs in parallel."

"Yes," I say. "That's exactly what it was.

"This, I know, will feel inconceivable, but everyone claimed him — even the most cruel racists of my time. He was an American icon so ubiquitous that he was almost devoid of meaning then. It's not unlike what happened to Jesus and Christianity. So when we honor him now, we are protecting not just his legacy — not just the truth of what our people endured, and for whom, and toward what — but we are also protecting the legacy of our faith in who we can be. The meaning of our faith and who we are for.

"My proximity to Brother Martin,  Vincent Harding, and to the freedom fighters that made me who I am compels me to make sure you understand who he was. So that you understand who you are.

"You know our history well enough to know when you allow yourself to live a life so full of love for people, it can get you into all kinds of trouble. Brother Martin didn't only decry that absurd invention of racism — he also started speaking against economic exploitation and militarism at a time when people saw them as inseparable from their way of life. It was dangerous. He challenged not just what was happening to our people at home, but also what our country was doing to people abroad. In a way, he was killed because he was a threat to people who loved power but didn't fully understand it. He was killed because ideas about who we are and who we can be to each other are powerful. I'll never forget hearing the recording of one of his teachers, Howard Thurman, who gave a radio address from Ghana after he was killed. Thurman said, 'He was killed because mankind is not quite human yet. May he live on because all of us are closer to being human than we ever have been before.'

"I know that I've been speaking about 'them' and 'us,' and I know your generation doesn't speak that way anymore. You have a species-level consciousness, and you're bringing us back from the catastrophes we couldn't avoid. We didn't have that back then — we didn't relate to each other as a human community destined for more — but Martin was a critical part in helping us get here. He wasn't alone. He came from a community and a tradition. One of the reasons I still continue that tradition is that when our laws and our institutions fail us, we must rely on our faith to see us through. The world we've achieved now can't ever be taken for granted. Human history is replete with stories of us at our worst. There is peace now, there's no climate crisis, immigration is humane, and there is still a struggle to make the world fair and equitable, but so much has changed. It's important to remember that the forces that killed Brother Martin live in us now, today too. The work is both internal and external. It's not just about the laws we pass or the rights we champion — it's what we cultivate in ourselves. So for me, honoring Martin is to raise a flag of sorts, to say this is the kind of human I'm committed to being, and it's a chance to honor all those around him who gave so much of themselves for the world we now inherit."

There were times that were so dark. I can remember in 2026 when half the country supported things that seemed so cruel, but then the people of Minneapolis—

I begin to cry.

My nephew reaches over and places a hand on my shoulder. "I know, Uncle," he says softly. He's quiet for a moment, looking out at the water. "We learned about some of it in school — George Floyd, Rene Good, Alex Pretti, all that came before we ratified the international conventions against paramilitaries and established global standards to protect us all from unjust policing. But I don't think I really understood what it cost. What it felt like to live through." He pauses. "The teachings are just normal to us now. It's easy to forget someone had to fight for that."

We sit together in silence. Then he gestures, and a translucent interface materializes in the air. "We're late for dinner, Unc. Should I call a pod to that cafe you like?"

I nod. A sleek vehicle rises from below, and we climb in. As we lift away, I look out over a city transformed — buildings wrapped in vegetation, their surfaces embedded with solar panels that drink in the light. The sky is clear.

The vision ends, but the work continues.