Remarks as prepared for delivery by EJS President Lisa Holder at The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Westside Coalition’s 39th Annual Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration on January 15, 2024, in Santa Monica.

If the history of America were the night sky, then Dr. Martin Luther King would be its brightest and most brilliant star- it’s North Star.

In America’s most sacred texts and charters, the nation claims to embody liberty and justice for all, equality of opportunity for all, the freedom for all to pursue happiness. Until Dr. King captivated America and transformed this nation’s consciousness on race, “for all” irrefutably meant “for the select few.”

Dr. King, through his words and deeds and through the courage of his convictions, showed America how to become America.

He gifted America and Americans a moral compass, a north star, to illuminate a path toward bona fide inclusive democracy rather than an aspirational democracy that existed solely on paper and in theory.

It was Dr. King’s unique ability to make manifest those words “for all” that make him America’s only uncompromised founding father and the greatest patriot this country has ever known.

I am honored to celebrate Dr. King’s legacy with you, my fellow patriots, today.

Dr. King’s Legacy – Love, Hope, and Courage a social emotional paradigm for the political sphere

Dr. King gifted us a social emotional playbook for uniting people across the divide of race within the political sphere. The social emotional triad that is his legacy is comprised of Love, Hope, and Courage.

Contrary to popular belief, these are not values or principles. Love, Hope and Courage are core emotions that transcend superficial characteristics of race and class and have the power to connect us on a fundamentally human level.

We associate Dr. King with a set of strategies and ideas – civil rights, passive resistance, collective action, nonviolence, civil disobedience and boycotts. These ideas were the tools he used to strip all of us to our very essence of feeling – to trigger empathy, to unleash the emotional triad of love, hope, and courage in the political sphere and to cultivate a sense of common humanity. This is how he cultivated a collective political consciousness and galvanized the collective will that finally manifested the American promise of Liberty “For All.”

Dr. King made believers out of the most cynical and disaffected because he was the embodiment of Love, Hope and Courage. He exuded these emotions in his transcendent sermons, speeches and commentaries. And he was captivating: America could not look away because his courage, love, and hope shined so bright.

Although Dr. King is no longer with us, his social emotional footprint looms large. Because of him we have a framework for effectively moving the needle toward multicultural inclusive democracy. We must continue to tether our struggles for progressivism and BIPOC and LGBTQ liberation to these foundational emotional touchstones of love, courage and hope.

Dr. King’s legacy is relevant to the progressive movement today

I am the President of the Equal Justice Society, a national racial and social justice legal organization founded by civil rights icons Eva Paterson and the late, great Professor Charles Ogletree.

We are movement lawyers and we litigate cases to end the school to prison pipeline and fix racially disproportionate school discipline, to get the police out of our schools, and to expand opportunity and access to higher education for marginalized students by removing barriers like the SAT from college admissions.

At EJS we work with social scientists and psychologists to develop the science around implicit bias and to figure out practical methods for reducing implicit bias in decision making in all institutions. We also educate the public, policy makers, and the courts to move away from the false notion that we are a colorblind society. We keep them informed of the data that establishes that brown and Black and indigenous people continue to be at the bottom of every metric that matters, and that structural and implicit bias continue to drive these disparate outcomes, signifying that America is not post-racial and our laws and policies cannot pretend that we are a colorblind society. Our position is that America cannot overcome racial disparities without race conscious equity programs to first level the playing field. We advocate for public policy, statutory laws and legal standards that consider race and center equity.

All of that to say that we at EJS continue to adhere to Dr. Kings teachings- after all as one pundit said Dr. King was a woke, critical race theorist who was all about DEI. More importantly we adhere to his core emotional touchstones in our engagement with underserved clients, constituents, thought partners and colleague – love, courage, and hope. Indeed, we center the work around these emotional touchstones, and we find that they continue to be relevant for organizing cross racial coalitions for policies like affirmative action, black reparations, the preservation of black studies and critical race theory and multicultural books and curriculums in our schools and DEI to correct for centuries of inequality in our institutions. We find that when you lead with love, the fear and fragility that divides us fall away. If you want to stop the hate, you must lead with love.

And frankly those of us who do this exhausting work, day in and day out, can only sustain the work when we treat one another with love and when we support each other to stay the course and have the courage of our convictions, even when the deck is stacked against us, and when we keep hope alive despite the challenges. Dr. Kings legacy of love is what makes the nonprofit social justice work emotionally and politically sustainable.

Preserving the Legacy – Stop the Hate

In order to preserve and expand Dr. King’s legacy and to protect the “For All,” we must be keenly aware of the opposing, negative, emotional forces that can overtake the political sphere when left unchecked. The opposite of Love is Hate. The opposite of Hope is Cynicism. The opposite of Courage is Apathy.

The critical defensive strategy that we must engage in the struggle is to stop the hate.

Sadly, hate, cynicism and apathy are ascending fast in the political sphere. This negative emotional triad constituted the driving force behind disruptive and destabilizing politics like the January 6 insurrection, the legal and cultural attacks on affirmative action, DEI, Critical Race Theory, reproductive choice, and other progressive polices. The goal of these reactionary forces is to drag us back to the liberty-and-justice-for-the-few construct that Dr. King and so many civil rights champions fought to resist.

Alarmingly, the right-wing demagogues who stoke the fears of vulnerable misguided Americans to trigger antipathy, apathy and cynicism employ a gaslighting tactic where they use Dr. King’s own words to undermine inclusive democracy. These reactionaries have the gall to claim that Dr. King’s sentiment that people should be measured by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin upholds the proposition that any and all race conscious policy constitutes reverse discrimination and is unlawful, bad policy. The reactionaries are flagrantly corrupting and co-opting Dr. King’s message to roll back critically important equity programs that take race into account to level the playing field. This gaslighting tactic is insufferable, it is a parasite, and must not be tolerated by those of us who are the keepers of Dr. King’s brilliant flame, of his dream, of his hope, of his love, and of his courage.

I leave you with two propositions – an action item and an affirmation.

One straightforward action item you should undertake to preserve Dr. Kings legacy and to protect the “for all” that he fought so hard for – when Dr. Kings words are misquoted and twisted in service of right wing, white supremacist, divisive rhetoric and agendas, take a page from the late Congressman John Lewis’s play book and say something, push back, make good trouble, and kick up a fuss until you set the record straight.

Finally, I leave you with a positive affirmation in honor of this day in particular and to sustain you in the struggle each and every other day of the year:

May the love, courage, and hope that is Dr. King’s legacy be the north star that illuminates your path to the mountaintop.