Power Properly Understood: Reclaiming MLK Day in 2025

“Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, or economic changes. In this sense power is not only desirable but necessary in order to implement the demands of love and justice.” - Martin Luther King, Jr., 1967

Today, we celebrate another Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and every year, I find it important to reiterate my incredible frustration with his remembrance being reduced to community service, acts of kindness, and dreams. Rev. Dr. King certainly served his people, he certainly exercised kindness to the undeserving, and he certainly had dreams, but those are not the crux of his legacy.

His legacy was that of courage and of an unyielding, unforgiving commitment to intense radical and systemic change - racial justice, economic justice, wealth redistribution, and the fight to abolish poverty, especially for Black people.

Society also tends to erase the arc of Rev. Dr. King’s thought and its evolution as he continued to metaphorically (and sometimes not metaphorically) bang his head against our country’s oppressive systems. Very rarely do we quote or teach about his works in the last year or his life, including his last book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community (1967), but I find it one of the most instructive.

This erasure and rewriting of his true legacy shouldn’t be surprising given that only two years before he was assassinated 77% of Americans did not think highly of Rev. Dr. King. Not only did they not think highly of him, but he was suspected to be a communist, called a race baiter, and named the most dangerous man in America by the FBI. 57 years later, he is canonized as the beacon of moral virtue and weaponized against those who continue to be unsatisfied with limited Black progress and continue to fight for Black liberation.

Every year, I spend time reflecting on what his legacy means to me and our current times, especially given what I have committed my life’s work to. I’ll leave you with some things I grapple with as I continue grow into the best version of myself:

• Individual Black success does not lead to Black liberation.
• For all the “good works” racial income and wealth gaps remain almost the same as they were over 55 years ago, and some are sliding backwards.
• Diversity and inclusion (representation - seats at a table) fail without justice, equity, and accessibility (power).
• That, with MLK Day celebrated only a few weeks after Kwanzaa, we don’t study and implement the principles of the Nguzo Saba enough.
• Non-violent does not mean peaceful - you don’t have to joyfully suffer oppression in order for your struggles and actions to be legitimate.
• You are not advancing Black liberation if you are spending time and energy tearing down other Black people for personal reasons. We can disagree, but we should disagree about issues, strategies, and systems, not each other. I often think about how they pit Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X against one another. Not only is it not necessary, it is detrimental to our collective advancement. There is wisdom to be gained from all our leaders.
• We have to deploy strategies and develop skills to survive in the world we live in now, while we continue to build the world we want.
• Process and order can be the enemy of progress, but discipline is the facilitator of change.
• Programs are Band-Aids to broken systems. They are necessary interventions, but they are not the goal, and will not lead to progress at scale.

What does MLK Jr.’s legacy mean to you? How will you honor it today?