King's words still resound

It can sometimes feel like partisanship and polarization have never been worse in the United States.

We argue about masks and elections, voting and science, crime and education, with so many conversations misled by misinformation. Surveys find that majorities believe the country is going in the wrong direction. We agree on little, and we rail on stagnant D.C. politics. And opinions on racial injustice continue to be an enduring dividing line.

It is worth remembering, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, that our nation has been in worse straits.

Certainly, we were at a deeper national low after the 1968 assassinations of MLK and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, which followed the murders of Malcolm X and President John F. Kennedy. Those years saw protests against an unpopular war and summers of unrest as Black neighborhoods exploded with the dynamite of decades of mistreatment and poverty. As the 1968 Kerner Commission observed, "Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the future of every American."

It is unwise to honey-coat that period or our path out of it. Those protesting the established and often inimical order were not polite or shy about their efforts. As King said in his "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963, "The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges."

The levels of discrimination across so many facets of American life, from employment to housing, were stunning compared to now. The challenges against Black voters were violent and state-sponsored, and the American Dream was dim for so many who were not white men.

We have come so far today, with the arc of the moral universe continuing to bend toward justice, as King prophesied. That does not mean our challenges are minor: There is too much poverty and insecurity in the richest country in the world. Many communities remain deeply segregated and educational opportunities are denied. Fairness in our criminal justice system remains a challenge, and it should be easier for Americans to vote and harder for politicians to play dangerous games with electoral counting. Those are long-standing issues. New and pressing ones like climate change and a two-year pandemic, which exposed dramatic inequities in health care, underscore how much we have to do and how little we can afford to be divided.

We would do well to remember King’s warning on that front. The religious and civil rights leader famously wrote, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." But especially after the pandemic, the sentences that follow should be as well-memorized and understood, among all those who have a hard time seeing the other side: "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."