(Washington, D.C., 1/19/2025) – The US Council of Muslim Organizations, America’s umbrella group of Muslim associations, marks Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day not merely in memory of his heroic and visionary civil and human rights call historically for our country through the 1950s and 60s, and for which he gave his life.
We reassert the crucial relevance and resonance of Dr. King’s central struggle for the soul of this nation today – namely, that America has not yet fulfilled its founding promise of racial, ethnic, and human equality by securing the unalienable guarantee of life, civil liberty, and the pursuit of social and economic happiness with justice for all in this land.
Dr. King’s message did not stop at America’s shores. He challenged our nation to recapture the eminently anti-imperialist spirit of the American Revolution. He called the American people and their government to “go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.”
Yet American militarism is now unleashed and perilously rampaging through the world. We abet genocide. We impose tyrants over downtrodden peoples. We propagate lethal unrest in distant lands. We execute regime change over our neighbors near and far. We threaten geographic annexation and dissection with friends and foes alike.
Dr. King reminds us, today, that America came into being with and for a goal. Freedom. And its Founders supplied us – We the People! – with the mechanisms to nurture and preserve that goal.
He said:
“Somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right.”
He reminded us that as Americans we carry the right and the burden of an overriding authority that inheres in this goal of freedom and in its mechanisms. It is to exert that American revolutionary spirit liberty and to uphold that generative American goal of freedom.
He said:
“And so just as I say we aren’t going to let any dogs or water hoses turn us around, we aren’t going to let any injunction turn us around. We are going on. We need all of you.”
We remember Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. today not only in the historical sense, but for the template his life-giving struggle bequeaths to our generation to drink deep of America’s founding wellsprings and bring our nation back to the ideals of its documented origins.
In the words of Dr. King:
“Standing up for the best in the American dream and taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy, which were dug deep by the founding fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.”
Let freedom ring.
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