Since 1986, our nation has honored the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the third Monday of January for his role as leader of the Civil Rights movement that protested unlawful federal and state laws during the final years of the Jim Crow Era (1950s-60s).

Several weeks before Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, he paid tribute to the man he called his mentor, W.E.B. DuBois, at an “honoring Dr. DuBois speech” at New York City’s Carnegie Hall. DuBois’ impressive educational background includes a bachelor’s degree from Fisk University (1888), a second bachelor’s degree from Harvard University (1890) and in 1895 he became the first Black to receive a PhD from Harvard.  DuBois was among a group of early Civil Rights advocates who formed the National Association of Colored People (NAACP) on Feb. 12,1909.  In his book, ‘The Souls of Black Folk,’ published in1903, DuBois accurately prophesied that the problem of the 20th century would be “the problem of the color line, the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Africa, Asia, in America and the islands of the seas.”

During DuBois’ era, racial discrimination was lawful in 17 border and southern states. Violence against ex-slaves who openly resisted discrimination rose sharply during that time. Lynchings in some states were commonplace.  Disenfranchisement and intimidation also were used to keep Blacks out of the mainstream. Power and control were held by whites only.

“One idea he insistently taught,” King said during his Carnegie Hall speech, “was that Black people have been kept in oppression and deprivation by a poisonous fog of lies that depicted him as inferior, born deficient and deservedly doomed in servitude to the grave. So insidiously this poison has been injected into the mind of America that it has infected not only whites but many Negroes. So long as the lie was believed, the brutality and criminality of conduct toward the Negro was easy for the conscience to bear.

DuBois recognized that the keystone in the arch of oppression was the myth of inferiority and he dedicated his brilliant talents to diminishing it,” King continued. “He was himself unsurpassed as an intellect, and he was a Negro. But beyond this, he was passionately proud to be Black, and finally he had not only genius and pride, but he had the indomitable spirit of the valiant. History cannot ignore W.E.B. DuBois because history has to reflect truth.”

At gatherings and protest marches during the 1950s and 1960s Dr. King often warned his followers of the danger that they might face on the roads they traveled. “My friends,” King occasionally said, “I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without legal and nonviolent pressure.  History is the long tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.  Individuals may see the moral light and give up their unjust posture, but groups are more immoral than individuals.”

Significant progress in the early stages of the civil rights movement took root in 1954 when the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, voted unanimously (9-0) to end racial segregation in southern public schools. A year later, Rosa Parks, a Black seamstress, refused to give up her seat to a white man while riding on a Montgomery, Alabama public bus. Her action led to a year-long bus boycott which ended with the integration of Montgomery’s public bus system and later other public bus systems throughout the South.

Montgomery was the first of numerous civil rights victories won by Dr. King. The world-renowned Christian minister’s accomplishments probably helped convince a larger number of white Americans to accept qualified Black Americans to serve in the nation’s highest leadership and managerial positions, including the presidency. Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president, served two terms (2008-2016).

The hostility and helplessness that most Black Americans of my generation (born 1942) experienced were tempered by decisions made by three former presidents (Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson) along with several educational and major corporate leaders. Truman desegregated the U.S. Armed Forces in 1948. Kennedy openly supported Black America’s bid for Civil Rights. After Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, President Johnson, a former segregationist, pushed his former Senate colleagues to support the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which strengthened the now weakened Black Americans right to vote. During that time, presidents of major universities, colleges and corporations opened their doors to Black students and job-seeking Black professors based on qualifications — not tokenism.

During DuBois’ era, many Black men and women had limited education. They raised their children working domestic or other unskilled jobs. Forced to live double lives, they hid their pain and displeasure with life behind deceptive smiles and believed they would know true love and happiness only in God’s heaven. In his book, ‘The Souls of Black Folk,’ DuBois wrote, “It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s soul through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

The social winds of change shifted dramatically to the far-right last year as Donald Trump began a second term as president on January 20, 2025. On Day 1, Trump pardoned nearly 1,600 people who had stormed the U.S. Capitol at his urging. Trump then spent the next few months in office ‘Making America Great Again’ by following far-right plans designed to make Black Americans second-class citizens again.

During that time, the Trump administration fired or permanently laid off more than 300,000 Black women from the federal workforce.  Charles Q. Brown Jr., former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (2023-2025) and several other Blacks in high-level government positions also were fired. Those dismissals were a deliberate effort to erase Black accomplishments. Historical data regarding Black achievers stored at the Smithsonian Institute is still being reevaluated for removal. Books — written by Black or white authors — regarding Black life during slavery and the Jim Crow era also are under review. Some might be banned.

Since the Supreme Court awarded Trump near total immunity when performing presidential duties and House Speaker Mike Johnson gift-wrapped his gavel to the President, our three-pronged checks-and-balances system of government has been reduced to one — the Executive branch. Whatever President Trump wants he mostly gets.

Do we really want a Gestapo-like federal force (i.e., Border Patrol and ICE (The Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents) moving from state-to-state snatching immigrants and some American citizens off the streets, from their jobs, homes, their neighbors’ homes? Are the leaders of our country and the rest of the world, comfortable watching illegal and legal immigrants and some American citizens, Black and white, arrested, beaten or shot to death by large groups of masked federal lawmen in the process of rounding up illegal immigrants?  ICE’s masked marauders, operating under the Department of Homeland Security, are becoming as intimidating and threatening to American citizens as the Ku Klux Klan’s white robes were to Black Americans during the Jim Crow era.

James Baldwin, one of the most gifted writers of the 20th century, believed that racial hatred in America can be extinguished – with a caveat. In his book, The Fire Next Time (1963), Baldwin tells his nephew not to believe that he is an inferior person. He wrote, “You were born into a society which spelled out in brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence you were expected to make peace with mediocrity. Please try to be clear that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear. And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. The really terrible thing old buddy, is that you must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in history, which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.”

Our Declaration of Independence includes a line that reads, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created. …” In school classrooms and meetings throughout the country we “pledge allegiance to the flag … and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, Indivisible with liberty and justice for all.” On the world stage, Christianity tells us that we should “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

Rather than follow the deadly and treacherous road of hatred why not travel the more productive path of love and understanding? That is the road all faith-based American citizens should want to take. If we fail to change course, we’ll witness the death of our great nation and will know it succumbed to the ageless three-pronged toxin: hatred, greed and corruption.

 

The second edition of Doug Smith’s novel, Same Same, will be published later this month.