POLITICS: What MLK might have to say about America today

What would the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. have to say about his country’s contentious racial landscape on this, his 97th birthday?

America is a far different place from the nation that saw King felled by an assassin’s bullet in 1968 at the young age of 39; different even from the country that made this a federal holiday in 1983.

Black Americans still face real inequities. Look at the huge numbers of crime victims, disproportionately black, generated by terrible progressive policies on public safety.

Or the decay of America’s public schools, once an engine of black social mobility: the erasure of all standards in order to conceal the failure of unionized teachers to actually teach.

Nor are these the only reasons African-Americans and the Democratic Party seem increasingly at odds, as the party’s woke elites obsess about issues (the green agenda, open borders, trans rights) irrelevant or contrary to the interests or views of most blacks.

Yet vast progress is impossible to deny: The United States has seen an African-American serve two terms as president — something King likely thought even his children would never see.

Race is no longer any barrier not just to the ballot box, but to elective office.

Such achievements surely would cheer Dr. King, and they came about because his movement fundamentally transformed America’s sensibility.

Born in the churches of the South, the civil-rights movement challenged white America to purge itself of racism.

It did so through moral power, nonviolence, an appeal to faith, a call for civil disobedience of unjust laws and a plea for full equality.

In just 13 years on the public stage, King accomplished his goals, not through coercion but by persuasion — and by demonstrating the all-too-frequent barbarity of those who sought to maintain injustice.

Of course he’d be dismayed at the injustices that remain.

He would be pained by the fact that while young African Americans are no longer barred from schools, they are too often denied a quality education.

We suspect he’d also be distressed by today’s discussions about race, the near-impossibility of honest dialogue and the insistence of too many on labeling any who disagree with them as racists.

He’d surely have cheered the passion of the Black Lives Matter movement — and issued strong words when BLM leaders turned the millions they solicited in the name of justice into their personal piggy banks.

A passionate supporter of Israel, he’d be profoundly troubled by the abandonment of the Jewish state by many who were his allies and supporters — especially the antisemitism that’s raged across campuses and the streets of America’s cities in the aftermath of Oct. 7.

Above all, he would be pained that we have yet to fully realize his dream of a time when people would be judged solely “by the content of their character” and “not on the color of their skin.”

He’d surely be infuriated at the obsessive racial grievance at the root of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion movement, which casts blacks as eternal victims, incapable of achieving anything without active discrimination against whites (and Asians).

For King’s was a universal message of equality and dignity for all: “Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.”

So we honor Dr. King for the goals he pursued and largely achieved — and for a vision the nation still strives to fully realize.

Yes, we nowadays forget the issues that made him even more controversial: his opposition to militarism; his denunciation of America as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

Ultimately, though, Martin Luther King’s legacy is that he managed to combat injustice by appealing to Americans’ highest aspirations. And that is why the nation rightly celebrates him today.