I was 18 years old on the first MLK Day. Like today in Minnesota, it was very cold in Iowa. Or, at least that’s how I remember the weather when walking to class that January. The class was noteworthy, too. I was lucky enough to be studying Dr. Martin Luther King, jr. on the first federal holiday in his honor. Utterly unaware of what I did not now and quite pleased to only have two hours of class a day through J-Term, I pushed myself through the frigid sunlit morning.
My teachers had always been white, like me. Understanding the effect of this on my education and self was among the many things about which I did not know to be curious in 1986. Still, I was eager to be studying a Black hero with a Black professor, and this anticipation only grew as the class learned on the first day that Dr. Williams had met and worked on civil rights campaigns with Dr. King. We also learned that he shared King’s route from Christian ministry to the activism. This background was immediately obvious as class introductions took almost the entire class as Dr. Williams impressively noted a personal connection to someone from nearly every student’s home town.
Dr. Lawrence Williams and I started at Luther College in the same year. My life in Wisconsin gave me quite a bit more experience with biting cold than his more than four decades in the upper South. He referenced this frequently, even wryly commenting that perhaps he should have followed Booker T. Washington’s advice for Black folks to stay down home, because it was warmer there. This quip came spontaneously in a lecture about the nineteenth-century context for the twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement.
By contextualizing King’s life so thoroughly in the traditions of the Black Civil Rights Movement and the Black church, Dr. Williams and the class introduced me to African American History as its own important narrative. I learned, and have since tried to impart to my students, the awful violence that framed White supremacy in American history. My. high school US History class included the African American Civil Rights Movement, but elided the violence of Jim Crow. I’m not sure if my teacher knew or cared about what he didn’t know about Black history, but at least we got past World War Two. Part of the MLK class was a narrative biography of King that included some stories of lynchings and bombings, including of King’s home in Montgomery. I was beginning to learn what Clint Smith tweeted on the first day of Black History Month two years ago.
It’s important to directly name the history of state-sanctioned and interpersonal violence Black folks have been subjected to, because to not so do allows for a story of this country to be told that isn’t true, it allows for the creation of harmful and disingenuous myth-making.
In the years since 1986 study and teaching my understanding of this in ways that help me to understand the present. As a tutor working with history students around the country, and a few from other countries, I see how most history classes have not fully taken this, or its analogs for other marginalized communities, fully onboard. Worse, in many communities any hint of sharing these truths with students brings savage attacks from a feral social movement aiming to uphold racial and gender hierarchies.
Dr. King, of course, and Dr. Williams dedicated their lives to confronting this reality. On MLK Day I want to remember the stakes in the struggle. As many historians note each year—including Kevin Kruse (If You Come at the King), Seth Cotlar (Totally Not Racist) and Thomas Zimmern Reckoning last year—defanging King’s critique of American society has been a casualty of having his life becoming a national holiday.
We see the consequences of this today as the Second Redemption’s assault on the Second Reconstruction takes a significant step. Dr. King and Dr. Williams, I think, would want me to look at this clearly,. I also think that they would agree with another tweet from Clint Smith from 2/1/22:
Sometimes, people think of Black history only in terms of the trauma Black folks have experienced. But what it also important, I think, is telling the story of what Black folks have achieved, created, & overcome in spite of that. Both parts of this story should be told together.

Onward.