Americans Should Understand MLK, Jr.’s True Legacy

The Voting Rights Act was King’s greatest achievement

We are celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy at the very moment when the Voting Rights Act, the seminal achievement of the Civil Rights Movement — which made pluralistic democracy a reality for the first time in American history — is on the chopping block at a Supreme Court dominated by MAGA hacks.

When Republicans mouth platitudes about King and wrongly insist the 14^th and 15^th Amendments prohibit Congress from taking race into account to remedy past discrimination, they are bastardizing history, ignoring the original meaning of the post-Civil War Amendments, overriding 60 years of precedent, and destroying King’s most important achievement.

After Bloody Sunday, King completed the march from Selma to Montgomery. He then delivered a speech — Our God is Marching On! — explaining the centrality of the right to vote in the fight against Jim Crow. “Our whole campaign in Alabama has been centered around the right to vote,” he said. “In focusing the attention of the nation and the world today on the flagrant denial of the right to vote, we are exposing the very origin, the root cause, of racial segregation in the Southland.”

Southern Whites had weaponized law enforcement and the courts to defend White supremacy and deny Blacks status as full citizens. Aided by “their control of mass media,” the ruling oligarchy in the Jim Crow South, King explained, “saturated the thinking of the poor White masses,” imposed segregation, and defended their power by preventing Blacks from voting to elect representatives who would advance their interests.

Rev. Martin Luther King, hands extended upward, during a press conference / World Telegram & Sun photo by Dick DeMarsico.

As a result, Blacks and whites suffered. The oligarchs in power used the hysteria of White nationalism and the bogeyman of Black violence to distract from the government’s utter failure to provide basic social services, education, and economically equality. Rotten governance has continued. The South still experiences higher rates of poverty, gun violence, hunger, and infant and maternal morbidity than regions that have cultivated true democracy and held their leaders accountable.

And here we are again. An overtly White nationalist Trump regime has ginned up fear of “the Great Replacement,” “wokeism,” immigrant violence, and anti-white discrimination (not to mention fear of changing your child’s gender and of women taking men’s jobs). High prices? No healthcare? Never mind. The regime is keeping you safe from these threats to white male dominance.

History may not repeat, but it does rhyme. We recently saw that when people rise up, as they have done in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Chicago, etc., to peacefully protest or demand their rights, the regime unleashes state-sponsored violence (just as it did in the last gasps of Jim Crow) to manufacture scenes of chaos and unrest. With carefully crafted state propaganda, the Trump regime tries to justify deploying even greater numbers of unhinged, untrained troops (who are told they have impunity to maim and kill protestors). Trump now dangles imposition of The Insurrection Act.

Change the location from Alabama 1965 to Chicago, Portland, or Minneapolis 2025-2026. Reverse roles of federal and state forces (now the Feds are the brutal, vicious, lawless ones). But whether 1965 or 2026, those in power use the same techniques to whip up white hysteria, paint nonwhites as aliens and threats to “real Americans,” and use the clash between armed police and people to traumatize all Americans.

In 2026, Trump hopes that the public will not focus on MAGA’s inflation-producing tariffs, denial of access to affordable healthcare coverage, deprivation of education (e.g., destroying the Department of Education, re-imposing huge student debt on financial aid recipients), increased inequality, and wholesale corruption. Just as in the pre-civil rights South, the only way MAGA can maintain power with such an unpopular, cruel agenda is by anti-democratic means. If they cannot be held accountable by voters at the ballot box, politicians need not fear those they have exploited or simply ignored from kicking them out of office.

And that requires Donald Trump and his MAGA lawyers to undo the seminal achievement of the Civil Rights Movement, the Voting Rights Act (VRA). (Trump has also taken to musing he will “cancel” the midterms, revealing his fascistic aim.) The Supreme Court is poised in Callais v. Louisiana to destroy the heart and soul of the VRA, Section 2.

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which argued the case at the Supreme Court, explains:

The VRA enshrined protections for voters across the country who were historically denied access to the ballot box. It was one of the most significant achievements of the Civil Rights Movement, ending Jim Crow-era tactics that prevented Black voters from exercising their fundamental rights. . . ... For the past 60 years, that fight has continued. Section 2 of the VRA, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting policies and district maps, is among the VRA’s most critical provisions to safeguard fair representation.

Upheld less than 3 years ago in Allen v. Milligan, Section 2 secures Black voters right to elect a candidate of their choice (i.e., preventing states from crowding Blacks into the fewest districts of spreading them out to dilute their vote). If the Supreme Court reverses Allen and strikes down the Louisiana map (that allowed a second Black congressional district in a state where the electorate is 30% Black), MAGA-controlled legislatures nationwide — but especially in the South — will use gerrymandering to undercut the ability of minority groups to elect representatives of their choice, the central legacy of the Civil Rights movement.

What then? Federal, state, and local Black and Hispanic representatives could be wiped out (again, especially in the South), and we will be back to one-party, white oligarchical rule. (In Jim Crow, the Democratic Party ruled, now it’s the Trump MAGA Party.) MAGA would face no obstacles in finalizing its reverse-Robin Hood economic scheme, assault on scientific research, and destruction of the Bill of Rights.

But even if MAGA justices, oblivious to history and indifferent to their legacy, go that route, White nationalists will not prevail. As King told listeners in 1965, peaceful protest will not abate until rights are secured:

Let us march on ballot boxes until race-baiters disappear from the political arena.

Let us march on ballot boxes until the salient misdeeds of bloodthirsty mobs will be transformed into the calculated good deeds of orderly citizens.

Let us march on ballot boxes until the Wallaces [or Trumps or Stephen Millers] of our nation tremble away in silence.

Let us march on ballot boxes until we send to our city councils, state legislatures, and the United States Congress, men who will not fear to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God.

Let us march on ballot boxes until brotherhood becomes more than a meaningless word in an opening prayer, but the order of the day on every legislative agenda.

Let us march on ballot boxes until all over Alabama God’s children will be able to walk the earth in decency and honor.

Today, we should remember King’s legacy and the foundation of our pluralistic democracy (the VRA). Most of all, we must embrace our obligation to defend our sacred rights and democratic inheritance in the face of fear-mongering and state-inflicted violence. We shall overcome.