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martin luther king jr
We Must Resist Trump’s Attack on DEI
Trump is, in effect, attempting with the stroke of a pen to undo over 60 years of hard-won progress in overcoming racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry.
Jan 25, 2025
This year, the presidential inauguration took place on the federal holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. President Donald Trump fully exploited the opportunity, hijacking King’s memory to advance his agenda. In his inaugural address, Trump took immediate aim at diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI. The bigotry embedded in Trump’s plans to “Make America Great Again” is stark—purging people of color and LGBTQIA people, not only from employment in the federal government, but from public life. But people have fought for too long, and too many have died, in the fight for equality.
“Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” refers to a system of policies and practices that promote fair treatment, full participation, and full access to employment and opportunities for all, especially for people from historically marginalized communities. Trump is, in effect, attempting with the stroke of a pen to undo over 60 years of hard-won progress in overcoming racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry.
“Today is Martin Luther King Day,” Trump said in his inaugural speech in the Capitol Rotunda, one of the only factually accurate statements he made. He went on, “In his honor, we will strive together to make his dream a reality. We will make his dream come true.”
Moments later, though, he pledged,
“This week, I will also end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life. We will forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based.”
Following the speech, Trump issued a flurry of executive orders. Within hours, a form letter was emailed to federal departments, ordering the suspension, by end of day Wednesday, of any staff working on DEI initiatives, and giving remaining staff 10 days to report any ongoing “disguised” DEI activity, ie, to rat out colleagues.
While Trump spoke at his inauguration, a different gathering was taking place just a few blocks from the White House. Hundreds packed into the historic Metropolitan AME Church, the storied Black church that abolitionist Frederick Douglass attended, and where his funeral took place. In 2005, after Rosa Parks lay in state in the Capitol, her casket was moved to Metropolitan AME, for a memorial service.
Civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton was speaking at the same moment as Trump. Hearing that Trump had invoked King’s name in his speech, Sharpton responded:
Donald Trump just said that he is going to end DEI this week, he’s gonna put out his executive orders. You have all these corporations that are saying they’re gonna back off DEI. Why do we have DEI? We have DEI because you denied us diversity, you denied us equity, you denied us inclusion. DEI was a remedy to the racial institutional bigotry practiced in academia and in these corporations. Now you want to put us back in the back of the bus? We’re going to do the Dr. King/Rosa Parks on you. We will call you out one by one, and we will shut you down.
Later on King Day, Trump held a rally where he signed the first stack of executive orders, including a blanket rescission of many of former President Joe Biden’s executive orders, including at least 15 that advanced diversity, equity, and inclusion. Later, Trump signed a much broader order calling for the termination of all “illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government,” and to “terminate, to the maximum extent allowed by law, all DEI, DEIA, and ‘environmental justice’ offices and positions.”
The “A” in DEIA stands for “accessible,” thus extending Trump’s war on fellow citizens to include the disabled.
Sharpton and other speakers invoked not only Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, but the whole sweep of history, from the first arrival of enslaved Africans in 1619, to Frederick Douglass, to the role of freed slaves fighting in the Civil War, through the protests in 2020 following the police killing of George Floyd.
Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, convened an emergency “Demand Diversity” roundtable in Washington D.C. on Wednesday. While Trump was inaugurated on King Day, Morial pointed out that Trump is no king:
These executive orders are unlawful, they are unconstitutional, and they seek to do what we always suspected. This is not a monarchy. You can’t rule by decree or edict. This is a constitutional democracy… we have to remember this as we go into this very important battle.
Participants in the roundtable, representing over 20 national civil rights and human rights organizations, form the core of a coalition committed to fighting Trump’s agenda. The coalition is guided and inspired by the memory and the lessons of Martin Luther King Jr. Organize, boycott, resist. These are the struggles, ultimately, that history will remember as great.
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The Michigan Legislature Should Honor Dr. King's Legacy by Rejecting an Anti-Worker Bill
The bill would limit the upward economic mobility of part-time workers and workers at businesses with less than 25 people, reduce paid time off, and strip workers of protections they may otherwise be entitled to.
Jan 25, 2025
This week, as we honor the work of and the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., we must remember that to meaningfully honor his legacy means to uplift his work fighting for working class communities through race and class solidarity, his critical work in the labor movement, and his efforts to ensure people understood that racial justice was deeply intertwined with economic justice. In fact, labor rights were so deeply entrenched in Dr. King's work that it is the right of the individual worker that brought him to Memphis before he was assassinated.
In February 1968, two Memphis garbage collectors, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death by a malfunctioning garbage truck. Following their preventable death, Black workers across the city went on strike to protest the long history of neglect and abuse of its Black employees. It was a tale as old as time: greedy CEOs and corporations with a history of forcing workers into unsafe working conditions and putting the safety of these workers at risk, and fed up labor leaders who were sick of being mistreated. Dr. King came to Memphis to show support for these striking workers, and addressed a crowd of 25,000 in Memphis.
This was not his first time standing up for the rights of the worker. While addressing the Illinois AFL-CIO in 1965, King quipped: "The two most dynamic movements that reshaped the nation during the past three decades are the labor and civil rights movements. Our combined strength is potentially enormous." And he was right. And the big corporations and wealthy elites of this country know it. That's why they have been fighting so hard against class solidarity and against worker protections
The choice before us is clear: We can stand with working families, or we can roll back essential protections that Michiganders have fought hard to secure.
We deserve an economy that works for all of us, especially working class people that are critical to keeping our economy afloat. A nation's economy must do more than just help people survive: it should take active measures to level the playing field. It should allow people to choose where and how to live. And it should enable them to pass on their wealth to the next generation.
In Michigan, instead of fighting to uplift working class families and make this vision a reality, the Michigan state legislature dishonors both their commitment to Michigan families and the legacy of MLK Jr. by working to pass an anti-worker bill known as the Earned Sick Time Act. This legislation is a red-herring claiming to fight for small businesses while stripping employees at those businesses of their rights. If passed, this bill would limit the upward economic mobility of workers at small businesses as well as part-time workers, reduce paid time off, and strip workers of protections they may otherwise be entitled to under state and federal labor laws.
In other words, this bill deprioritizes workers at a time when Michigan families, Black mothers, and caregivers of color are struggling with rising costs. With so many of us feeling the squeeze at the grocery store while searching for child or eldercare, paying rent, or helping our kids afford college, elected officials should be working to level the playing field, not widening income disparities. The choice before us is clear: We can stand with working families, or we can roll back essential protections that Michiganders have fought hard to secure. I choose to stand with working families, and I urge our elected officials in the state to do the same by voting no on the Earned Sick Time Act.
The bill's proposed changes to earned paid sick time would make it harder for workers to care for themselves and their families. Right now, more than 1.7 million Michigan workers lack access to even one hour of paid sick time. This isn't just a statistic—it represents real families in our districts making impossible choices between their health, their safety, and their paycheck. The Earned Sick Time Act would worsen this crisis by reducing protections for thousands more workers, forcing them to choose between coming into work sick and risking the health of those around them, and keeping food on the table.
The most troubling part is this fight we are faced with in Michigan is not unique. All across the country, we are seeing billionaires and dark money groups working to strip people of their rights and their ability to provide for their families. It reminds us of a very simple truth: The American Dream is not attainable for a majority of Americans, nor has it ever been. The myths politicians tell us have been harmful to real progress. They say that if you work hard enough, you too can get rich. But this "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" idea has failed us. It keeps us trapped in uncertainty and instability while the rich get richer and we fight among ourselves. That's why I am calling on Michigan leadership to ensure a bill that would further move the goalpost of what the American Dream could be does not pass. We can do better for each other than this.
A resilient economy is a collaborative effort, not a competition. We can have a nation free of bigotry, provide for people while they are ill, and help people access prosperity and opportunity. It's not a zero-sum game. Dr. King's life was a testament to this. He was dedicated to the fight for economic justice, fair wages, and labor rights, in addition to racial justice and equality. He gave everything, including his life, to this mission. We must ensure his legacy lives on by picking up his mantle. We must have the political courage to fight back against corporate interests and with the people that brought elected leaders to power.
In our interconnected world, our success depends on our neighbors' success. So let's succeed by uplifting each other. As we brace ourselves for what will come under a Trump administration, it's more important than ever that we stand together.
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'WTF?' World Reacts to Trump's Vow of US Expansionism
One former Swedish prime minister called the Republican president's pledge to grow U.S. territory "a recipe for global instability."
Jan 20, 2025
While the global far-right cheered President Donald Trump's return to the White House on Monday, world leaders, elected officials, activists, and others from across the rest of the political spectrum reacted with trepidation as the Republican vowed to expand the nation's territory for the first time in nearly 80 years and threatened the sovereignty of a U.S. trade and security partner.
In his second inaugural address, Trump promised a foreign policy that "expands our territory," as well as the renewed pursuit of "Manifest Destiny"—the 19th-century belief that God intended the United States to control the continent from coast to coast—beyond Earth by "launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars."
"That's a dangerous statement in itself, but then others around the world might also be inspired to do the same."
In the United States, Monday's inauguration coincided with the federal holiday honoring the assassinated civil rights champion Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whom Trump mentioned in his speech. Some observers noted the incongruity of Trump's message with King's anti-war ethos.
"How dare Donald Trump invoke Dr. King," pan-African studies professor and Black Lives Matter Los Angeles co-founder Melina Abdullah fumed on social media. "Trump IS the embodiment of the three evils that MLK warned of: racism, materialism, and militarism."
Indigenous voices reminded listeners that belief in Manifest Destiny fueled genocidal violence against Native Americans.
"Trump is really going after Native Americans with references to Manifest Destiny, the frontier, Wild West, and erasing Denali's name," attorney Brett Chapman, a direct descendant of the Ponca Cshief White Eagle, said on social media. "This anti-Indigenous inaugural address sounds like one from the 1800s when presidents deployed the U.S. military on Native Americans seeking rights."
In his speech, Trump falsely accused China of "running the Panama Canal," said that Panama—which was last invaded by American forces in 1989—is overcharging U.S. ships to use the crucial waterway, and warned that "we're taking it back."
As angry demonstrators rallied outside the U.S. Embassy in Panama City, right-wing Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino issued a statement refuting Trump's threats and accusations and declaring that "the canal is and will continue to be Panamanian."
Trump's threat follows his refusal earlier this month to rule out the use of military force in order to conquer the Panama Canal or Greenland, a territory of NATO ally Denmark.
South American progressives were left stunned by parts of Trump's address.
"In his inauguration speech, Donald Trump made it clear that reality surpasses fiction," Carol Dartora, a leftist lawmaker in the lower chamber of Brazil's National Congress, said in a video posted online. "Then the U.S. president exuded machismo, imperialism, and xenophobia, especially against immigrants."
Across the Atlantic, former center-right Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt said: "Now we know that President Trump wants to 'expand our territory.' That's a dangerous statement in itself, but then others around the world might also be inspired to do the same. It's a recipe for global instability."
German author, filmmaker, and journalist Annette Dittert
responded to Trump's expansionist pledge with a popular three-letter internet acronym: "'We will become a nation that expands our territory?' WTF?"
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