Martin Luther King, Jr.

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. did not arrive late to the anti-war movement. He was there before the headlines called him “divisive,” before his friends whispered that he’d gone too far, before even the movement he helped birth began to turn away.  

Long before all that, Dr. King stood before the nation and declared that the choice before us was not simply moral, it was existential: “It is either nonviolence or nonexistence.” This was not the language of political convenience. It was the language of a man who understood that the architecture of American power, its bombs, its bases, its brutal indifference, was not confined to foreign jungles. It echoed in the segregated streets of Birmingham, in the poverty-choked tenements of Chicago, in the deafening silence of a government more committed to empire than to equity. 

In recent weeks, almost six decades later, the country stared down the barrel of another global disaster of a war with the military strikes against Iran. Though a fragile ceasefire now holds, the world watched as violence again erupted, underscoring how unresolved conflict continues to reverberate across borders and within us.

The names of the countries may be unrelated, the locations may be different, but the logic remains the same. America is once again entangled in a region already hemorrhaging from too much history and too little justice. Our drones hum where helicopters once thundered. Our sanctions choke where napalm once seared. And still, we claim the role of peacekeeper, broker, reluctant warrior. 

We must be honest about the moral duplicity here. This is a nation that lectures the world on freedom while banning books that teach its children about the actual cost of freedom. A nation that funds bombs abroad while defunding equity at home. A nation that speaks of democracy in foreign tongues but forgets how to pronounce it in places like Ferguson, Flint, or Florida.

This is not merely a contradiction; it is a collapse. Because while America projects its might overseas, it wages a quieter war here at home. A war on memory. A war on truth. A war on justice itself.   

The recent passage of the federal One Big Beautiful Bill Act deepens the moral fault lines Dr. King warned us about.

Signed on July 4, the bill amounts to a sweeping rollback of civil rights protections masquerading as legislative reform—codifying indifference at the highest level. It slashes over $1 trillion from Medicaid, imposes strict work requirements on SNAP recipients up to age 64, and phases out clean energy credits, while simultaneously funneling historic levels of funding into ICE enforcement and military expansion.  

It also dismantles key equity safeguards, including the rescission of Executive Order 11246, which had long mandated affirmative action for federal contractors. These are not abstract policy shifts; they are material assaults on the health, agency, and future of marginalized communities. And make no mistake—when the rights and resources of the most vulnerable are eroded, the whole of society fractures. The assault on some of us destabilizes all of us, deepening distrust, weakening democracy, and shrinking the moral imagination of the nation.  

Just as Dr. King confronted a government that prioritized military aggression abroad over dignity at home, we now face a federal agenda that elevates cultural backlash over civil rights and silences the most vulnerable under the guise of national renewal. As King warned, “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” The challenge now is whether we will be a nation of memory and accountability—or one of erasure and retreat. 

Somewhere deep in the midst of this turmoil, America’s greatness might still be found.  

We can find the capacity to face ourselves and to confront our contradictions with determination. We are a nation that celebrates not one, but two Independence Days with July 4th and Juneteenth—one born in revolution, the other in reckoning. One declares freedom, the other proves it incomplete. 

These two celebrations aren’t contradictions. They’re a mirror. They show us the whole story of who we’ve been and point toward who we still can become. They remind us that the American promise was never finished work, but something we shape with every act of courage, every step toward justice. A nation capable of forgiving itself by not forgetting, but by remembering more honestly, telling the full story, and making whole what was broken. 

This is how we show the world what democracy looks like, not in our military might, but in our moral courage, not in our slogans, but in our willingness to build a country that keeps its promises. We can exercise our First Amendment right “to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” — nonviolent resistance works if we look across time and the globe.  

On the eve of our country’s 250th birthday, we can show the world that equity is not an afterthought, but an engine proving that shared prosperity outperforms 246 years of chattel slavery. Boston certainly can do this, with the myriad stories told through the many initiatives established to mark the anniversary: Everyone250, Boston250, MA250, and Revolution250.  

Dr. King saw that possibility. He believed in a nation that could transform from the inside out. So the choice remains as urgent now as it was then. Not between nostalgia and progress, but between conscience and complicity. Between myth and memory. Between nonviolence and nonexistence. 

And between the country we are, and the country we still have time to become. 

Imari Paris Jeffries is the president and CEO of Embrace Boston.