
Sitting in his Atlanta home office with his wife and fellow civil rights activist Arndrea Waters King, Martin Luther King III can’t help but reflect on a deep irony: Martin Luther King Jr. Day coincides with the second presidential inauguration of Donald Trump on Jan. 20.
He worries about the fact that his father’s only grandchild, 16-year-old Yolanda Renee King, lives in a country where her rights might not be secure.
The 14th and 15 amendments’ guarantees of civil rights to Black Americans could be diluted, depending on how the U.S. Supreme Court, with a 6-3 conservative majority that includes three Trump appointees, decides an important racial gerrymandering case this year. And depending on where they live, women today no longer enjoy the right to choose whether to give birth because the high court in 2022 overturned the constitutional right to abortion.
“We, as a society, have so many issues to navigate,” King told Capital B in the lead-up to Inauguration Day, as he talked about the significance of pursuing social and economic equality. “There’s a pathway that includes everyone and doesn’t exclude anyone. And we have to continue to find a way to expand, not retract. That’s what my father and mother were about — expanding.”
The couple will spend Jan. 20 in separate locations: Martin Luther King III and his daughter will be in Memphis, Tennessee, for events, and Arndrea Waters King will be in San Antonio for the city’s MLK March — the largest march of its kind in the country.
Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King, had four children. Their oldest, Yolanda King, died in 2007 at the age of 51. Martin Luther King III is the older of two sons; the younger son, Dexter King, died in 2024 at 62. Bernice King, the youngest child, is the CEO of the Atlanta-based nonprofit The King Center, founded in 1968 by her mother.
Martin Luther King III, who was 10 when his father was gunned down in Memphis, and Arndrea Waters King see Jan. 20 as an opportunity. Americans have a chance, they say, not only to revisit the slain reverend’s principles — particularly his emphasis on nonviolence and his commitment to economic justice — but also to determine what kind of country we want to be.
“This juxtaposition offers all of us a glaring contrast. What path do we, as a nation, choose to take? You couldn’t have a more obvious example of the extremities,” said Arndrea Waters King, the president of the Drum Major Institute, a New York City-based nonprofit, asking whether we’re going to go down a path of division or peace.

She also noted that this month marks four years since Trump supporters laid siege to the U.S. Capitol, describing the Jan. 6 riot — incited by Trump’s baseless claims that heavily Black cities such as Atlanta, Detroit, and Philadelphia were plagued by voter fraud — as “a physical attack on our democracy.”
Had Trump lost the 2024 presidential election, the U.S. Department of Justice would’ve had the evidence necessary to convict him for his attempt to block the 2020 results that culminated in the Jan. 6 assault, former special counsel Jack Smith said in his final public report, published on Jan. 14. (Sitting presidents are largely shielded from prosecution while in office.)
Like her brother and sister-in-law, Bernice King believes that there’s a silver lining to the fact that the King holiday overlaps with Trump’s second inauguration.
“I’m just glad it happened that way, that it’s not a day that he can be the star, which he loves to be,” she told the Associated Press earlier this month. “He has to contend with that legacy on that day, regardless of how he manages it and handles it in his presentation.”
Capital B reached out to Bernice King but hadn’t heard back by the time of publication.
Why do nonviolence and economic justice still matter?
As the Kings and other activists see it, the country ought to use the irony of the holiday this year to rededicate itself to understanding the assassinated civil rights leader’s principles.
For instance, no matter how often their opponents directed violence at them, Martin Luther King Jr. and his lieutenants never resorted to it themselves. Instead, they embraced a philosophy of nonviolent resistance, which is “the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom,” King argued.
This approach was apparent during the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march in Alabama. Led by John Lewis and Hosea Williams, hundreds of peaceful protesters set out to push for Black voting rights. But as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, state troopers attacked them, even fracturing Lewis’ skull. The tragedy became known as Bloody Sunday.

It’s King’s devotion to nonviolence that Montgomery native Evan Milligan is thinking about most in our current political climate, given how significantly violent rhetoric marked Trump’s White House bid. Last November, Trump called former Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming a “war hawk,” and he imagined “nine barrels shooting at her.” Earlier that year, in March, he warned that it would be a “bloodbath for the country” if “I don’t get elected.”
“I’m wrestling with — and I think that a lot of the country is wrestling with — these two extremes in our political culture,” Milligan, who was the named plaintiff in the high court’s key voting rights case in 2023, told Capital B. “We’ve had this long trajectory of American idealism that appeals to pacifism and civil disobedience and nonviolent direct action. But then we’ve also had suppression and violence, including Jan. 6. Over the next few years, I think that these two different behaviors and the cultures that support them will be on full display.”
Milligan, the co-director of the Common Good Program at the Portland-based nonprofit Western States Center, added that he’s concerned about the impact this moment could have on his kids and their peers, as they see Trump avoid punishment for his behavior.
“Young people are in school just trying to figure out what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s ethical and what’s not,” he said, his his son and daughter horsing around in the background.
Yet there was much more to King’s worldview than just his commitment to nonviolence, according to his older son.
Martin Luther King III insists that it would be unwise to ignore his father’s economic message. He maintained that poverty was one of the three primary evils of U.S. society, and that economic justice — access to a decent job with decent pay, health care, and a good home — must be a central plank of any true liberation movement. (The two other evils were racism and war or militarism).
“My father wasn’t killed [just] because he was talking about riding at the front of the bus and being able to sit down at a restaurant. One of the major reasons he was killed was because he was talking about a radical redistribution of wealth,” King explained. “His last campaign was the Poor People’s Campaign. He didn’t live to see it come to fruition, but he was talking about bringing together poor Americans from all walks of life to demand equal opportunity.”
King recalled an adage: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. This sentiment feels especially powerful today, he said, in light of the ongoing effort to ban books covering Black history from public schools and scale back diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
But he suggested that it’s precisely because of the censoriousness of our present-day political environment that we must elevate the entirety of his father’s beliefs — including his economic philosophy — rather than the whitewashed version of those beliefs that some conservative politicians seem to favor.
“It’s important to understand Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King in their totality,” he said. “Because the economic message is very strong. We must work together to create the America that America ought to be for all of its citizens.”
What does it mean to “be on the front lines” today?
Arndrea Waters King regularly tells the parable of the little girl who one day went to her grandmother with a dilemma. She told her grandmother that a battle was raging within her, a battle between two wolves — a wolf of love and peace, and a wolf of anger and hatred. She asked which one would win. Her grandmother pulled her close, and said: the one you feed.
The U.S. faces a similar conflict now, according to King: Will we feed the wolf of love and peace, as her in-laws did, or will we feed the wolf of anger and hatred?
She wants us to choose the former. And to that end, she said that she’ll continue to push for legislation that lifts marginalized communities — bills such as the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. They would strengthen federal protections at the ballot box after the Supreme Court in 2013 defanged the Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson just a few months after the brutality of Bloody Sunday shocked the country.

“We’ll always be on the front lines, standing for justice and equality, and standing against the triple evils of racism, poverty, and violence,” King said. “We understand that you can’t legislate a man’s heart, but at the same time, we have to find a way to come together and do something to be a part of the dream and build the collective consciousness of the beloved community.”
She and her husband helped to launch Realize the Dream, an initiative created to inspire a coalition of young people across the country to jointly perform 100 million hours of community service by the late reverend’s 100th birthday on Jan. 15, 2029, and be active in the world that they’ll one day inherit.
Bernice King also is encouraging everyone to honor her father with their actions — not just with their words — and to make sure that those actions are in line with the murdered leader’s teachings.
“I’m calling us to do more than quote King, which we love to do,” she said earlier this month, as she launched a series of events ahead of the Jan. 20 holiday. “I always ask people: Are you doing it in the spirit of Dr. King? Are you doing it from a compassionate place, from a love-centered place? Are you doing it in a way that respects the dignity and worth of all individuals?”
It’s a formidable legacy to grapple with, said Martin Luther King III. His father, he explained, challenged people to operate at a higher level, to be the best possible versions of themselves. He appealed to our better angels, wanting Americans to move the country forward, not backward, and to do so in a way that was constructive rather than destructive.
It’s OK for us to disagree at times, Martin Luther King III said, but we shouldn’t be at such loggerheads that we can no longer communicate or recognize the rights and dignity of our fellow Americans.
“That’s just not good. That’s not right. That’s not what my father and mother represented,” he said, adding that one way to honor his father is by practicing what he preached.
“Dad would say that we must learn nonviolence — or we may face nonexistence.”
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