MLK Day meets Inauguration Day
Alex Lim / The Exonian
By JOHANNA HILLMAN ‘28
This past Monday, Exonians attended a “day on” of workshops, community service, and antiracist learning to honor the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. MLK had an incredibly significant impact on the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, and is known for fighting for the civil rights of Black Americans and advocating non-violent methods of protest.
MLK Day was signed into law in 1983 by then-president Ronald Reagan, making the third Monday in January a federal holiday after a years-long congressional battle. The holiday was first proposed in 1968 by Michigan representative John Conyers, but was for many years opposed by House Republicans. However, in 1983, with the support of Coretta Scott King, the Black Caucus, and much of the public, the bill eventually passed the House and the Senate and was signed into law by Reagan. Phillips Exeter did not honor MLK day until 1991 after a faculty member, James Montford, went on a hunger strike to protest the lack of an institutional acknowledgment of the legacy of MLK. Over the years, the academy has modified MLK Day to make it more hands-on and engaging for students, as well as expanding its reach from a day specifically meant to honor MLK to a day meant for celebrating the diversity of our school. This Monday, Exonians had the choice of 22 workshops and three community service projects, which range from workshops covering the history of the civil rights movement to workshops focusing on Exonians’ experience to workshops centered around cuisine.
However, while we were in workshops learning about the legacy of King, anti-black racism today, or engaging in community service, in Washington DC the United States of America inaugurated its 47th president, Donald Trump. It’s ironic, certainly, that the inauguration of Trump occurred on the same day that we celebrated the legacy of King. It’s also certainly ironic that on this MLK Day, we could have been celebrating the inauguration of the first Black woman president, but are not.
The words and actions of Donald Trump — during, before, and after his presidency — stand in stark contrast to the work of MLK. While MLK advocated for the rights of Black people to participate fully as citizens of the US, Donald Trump told Ayanna Pressley, a Black congresswoman who was born in the US, among others, to go back where she came from (NBC News). Trump has also repeatedly questioned whether the first Black president of the US, Barack Obama, was born in the US (Politico). While MLK preached acceptance and unity, during a presidential debate this summer Donald Trump perpetuated the baseless claim that Haitian immigrants have been “eating the dogs” of US citizens (BBC). Trump has called Black people “lazy”, “rabid”, and “animals” (PBS) — all racist tropes that invoke 18th-century pseudoscience which claimed falsely that Black people were a different species than white people.
It’s sad that on the day when we could have celebrated the first Black woman president of the United States as a sign of our progress towards equality, we instead must take this day as a reminder that there is more work to be done. However, that being said, I would argue that there is in fact no better day this January that MLK Day could be on. Rather than Inauguration Day being a day of defeat for anyone who desires equity and justice, it instead was able to be a day to remind us that the fight for equality is not over. It’s an incredibly timely day to remember the dream King fought for: that one day, the United States will be a place where people are judged not “by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” a place free from prejudice and discrimination, where one day “Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands.”