It is tempting, especially during moments of national strain, to summon the voice of Martin Luther King Jr. as a form of reassurance. His words have been polished into civic scripture, safe and endlessly repeatable. But to ask what King would say about the state of Black America today requires resisting that impulse. It requires reckoning not with the King we have made comfortable, but with the King who unsettled power, fractured alliances and insisted on moral clarity even when it came at great personal cost.

I do not dare presume to know precisely what Martin Luther King Jr. would say in this moment. He was a man shaped by his time, his theology and his circumstances. But I do know what I would hope he would say and what I believe his life’s work obliges us to confront.

We are living in a period marked by profound contradiction. Black Americans occupy unprecedented positions of visibility and influence, yet the structural conditions that King spent his life challenging remain deeply entrenched. Hardwon gains are being rolled back with alarming speed. Affirmative action has been gutted by the Supreme Court, reframed as unfair advantage rather than partial remedy. Diversity, equity and inclusion programs are now caricatured as ideological threats and systematically dismantled. Voting rights protections continue to erode. The safety net frays. And federal agencies tasked with immigration enforcement now operate with military-grade impunity in Black neighborhoods, targeting not just immigrants but anyone perceived as an obstacle.

In an interview published Jan. 11, President Trump said aloud what his administration has been enacting for weeks: that Civil Rights-era protections resulted in white people being “very badly treated,” that the legacy of the Civil Rights Act amounts to “reverse discrimination.” His Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — the agency created by that very act to combat workplace discrimination — has been actively recruiting white men to file complaints against diversity programs, calling such initiatives “a deliberate program of discrimination.” The ideology driving the rollbacks is no longer subtext. It is policy, stated plainly.

If King were alive today, I would hope he would remind us first that none of this is accidental.

King was clear, especially in the final years of his life, that racism was not merely a matter of personal prejudice but a deeply embedded system of political and economic power. He warned that progress without structural change was fragile — that symbolic inclusion without redistribution would ultimately betray those most in need. The backlash against affirmative action and DEI initiatives is not surprising. These policies, limited as they are, represent an acknowledgment that inequality is not simply the result of individual failure. Their dismantling signals a broader refusal to reckon with history or responsibility.

I would hope King would say that equity has always been contested because justice has always been inconvenient.

When the sitting president declares that the Civil Rights Act itself constituted discrimination against white people, we are past the era of coded appeals to “fairness” and “merit.” What we are witnessing is not a policy debate but an ideological project: the reframing of equality as oppression, of remedy as punishment, of justice as theft. We are told that naming racism perpetuates division, that acknowledging structural inequality is itself unfair, that the problem is not injustice but our insistence on talking about it.

King knew better. He understood that appeals to “fairness” often mask a desire to preserve existing advantage. In his own time, he confronted liberals who professed sympathy for civil rights while resisting the policies necessary to achieve them. He warned against those who preferred order to justice and moderation to truth.

I would hope King would also speak plainly about immigration enforcement and its role in Black life today. Though often remembered solely as a Black American leader, King consistently articulated a vision of human dignity that transcended borders. His Poor People’s Campaign explicitly included immigrants, recognizing that the systems criminalizing Black organizing were the same systems criminalizing immigrant organizing.

Today, immigration enforcement has become another apparatus of state violence disproportionately deployed in Black and brown communities. Haitian asylum seekers are deported en masse. African migrants languish in detention. Black neighborhoods become sites of ICE operations and raids. In recent months, individuals have been killed during immigration enforcement actions, including Keith Porter, a Black man shot by an off-duty ICE agent in Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve.

King would reject narratives that pit Black communities against immigrant communities, recognizing them instead as parallel targets of the same systems of exclusion. He would remind us that solidarity is not sentimental — it is strategic.

Perhaps most urgently, I would hope King would address the treatment of dissent in our time. Nonviolent resistance was not, for King, a passive or polite act. It was a deliberate confrontation designed to expose injustice and force moral reckoning. That peaceful protest is now met with militarized force, mass arrests, surveillance and even lethal violence would not surprise him. He experienced it firsthand in Birmingham, Selma, Chicago and Memphis. What might alarm him is how quickly such repression is normalized — and how often it is justified in the language of public safety or national security.

I would hope King would say that when peaceful protest is criminalized, when legal observers are endangered, when bearing witness becomes grounds for state violence, the problem is not the protest — but the society it threatens to expose.

At the same time, King would most likely challenge Black America itself — not with condemnation, but with insistence. He never romanticized suffering, nor did he mistake representation for liberation. He would caution against measuring progress solely by visibility or individual success. He would ask whether economic inequality has narrowed, whether political power has deepened and whether the most vulnerable among us are more secure.

King’s final speeches make clear that he was moving toward an increasingly radical critique of American society — one that linked racism, poverty and militarism as interlocking evils. I would hope that, today, he would urge us not to retreat from that analysis simply because it is uncomfortable or politically risky.

He paid dearly for speaking against the Vietnam War and for advocating economic justice. He understood that moral leadership often comes at the cost of popularity, access, and safety.

In the end, I do not need King to tell us exactly what to do. His life already tells us what is required: Courage over convenience. Truth over comfort. Solidarity over silence. Structural change over symbolic progress.

So perhaps the better question is not what Martin Luther King Jr. would say about the state of Black America today — but whether we are prepared to hear him if he did. Whether we are willing to name what we see. Whether we have the courage to demand not better optics but different systems. Whether we can build the coalitions his vision required — across race, across borders, across the false divides that power uses to fracture resistance.

King did not die believing that America would perfect itself through good intentions. He died knowing that justice is seized, not granted, and that it requires more of us than we often want to give. Especially now, when the highest office in the land has declared that his legacy was harm, not healing.

The question, then, is not what he would say. The question is what we will do.

Taneshia Nash Laird is an associate professor in Africana Studies at Berklee College of Music and coauthor of “Still I Rise: A Graphic History of African Americans.”