There were four major themes in the work and witness of Martin Luther King, Jr. The first was the fight against racism, especially as it took the form of segregation. The second was poverty and economic injustice that involved fair wages and equal access to wealth-building such as home ownership, access to mortgages, and mobility that allowed people to live wherever their money allowed them to move. The third was ending wasteful military spending that diverted national resources to Viet Nam at a rate in 1965 of $500,000 per day. The fourth was access to the vote without the Jim Crow era restrictions of the poll tax, the grandfather clause, a literacy test, or stating precisely the number of bubbles in a bar of soap or the number of jelly beans in a jar.
We are fighting all of those battles again in 2022.
Thanks to Donald Trump and his ilk, racism has been unleashed against African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Muslims, and Native Americans. The wealth gap widens every year, and black home ownership is steadily declining. The Congress passed a $772 billion defense budget but will not approve the $1.7 trillion Build Back Better infrastructure bill payable over 10-years, or $170 billion per year. We still spend over four times more to kill overseas than we do to rebuild our infrastructure and address our human workforce needs here at home. We spent $2.7 trillion over 20-years to fight a losing war in Afghanistan, but we will not spend $1.7 trillion over ten years to provide childcare, job training, access to medical care, and so much more that would benefit our working parents, our children, our senior citizens, our college students, and our citizens with disabilities here at home.
Now we come to voting rights which is under attack across this country, including here in Ohio. Between gerrymandering and voter suppression, we are headed toward autocracy and minority rule, rather than democracy and a government of, by and for the people. Republican state legislatures have concluded that the only way they can hold onto power is to limit, and not expand voting rights. They talk about voter fraud and election integrity, even though there were over 60 court cases across the country last year that concluded there was no fraud in the 2020 elections.
Two bills to protect voting rights cannot be passed, because some U.S. Senators are fixated on the Jim Crow era issue of “states’ rights” and local control of elections, while others are fixated on the Jim Crow era practice called the filibuster which prohibits majority rule which is the backbone of all democratic governments.
People want to focus only on the words, “I Have a Dream,” without realizing that a nightmare is unfolding right around us that is rejecting everything MLK, Jr. stood for.
There are four different battles we can choose to fight. In honor of Dr. King, so please fight at least one of them!
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The Rev. Marvin A. McMickle, pastor emeritus of Antioch Baptist Church in Cleveland, Ohio, retired in 2019 as president of Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School in Rochester, New York, where he had served since 2011.
