Minnesota marks Martin Luther King Jr. Day against backdrop of Trump’s inauguration

More than 2,000 people gathered for an annual breakfast Monday in Minneapolis to honor civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy, hours before Donald Trump’s inauguration as America’s 47th president.

“The collision on the calendar today of the commemoration and the inauguration seems like it should be a call to action, a message wrapped up in a metaphor, a reminder that the federal commemoration of Dr. King’s life is not merely a day off from work, but a day on, a day for us to remember that we are all one people,” keynote speaker Michele Norris, a renowned journalist, said in her address.

Alluding to King’s final speech in 1968 to striking sanitation workers, Norris noted that “Dr. King spoke of the mountaintop, and it feels like right now we are living in a moment where the hill is particularly steep.” She encouraged attendees to remind each other “that the hill is steep, but we are strong.”

Minnesotans came together at the Minneapolis Convention Center to celebrate King’s message of fighting for civil rights and equality and to consider how they could keep his spirit alive through action. The theme of this year’s event was “One People,” and though Trump’s swearing-in was seldom mentioned, attendees heard a message of unity amid a divided and contentious political climate.

Norris recently joined MSNBC as a senior contributing editor. A graduate of Washburn High School in south Minneapolis, Norris launched her career as a reporter at the Washington Post and other publications before she was hired at NPR’s “All Things Considered” and became the organization’s first Black female host.

General Mills’ head of diversity, inclusion and belonging Courtney Schroeder invoked a letter King wrote from jail in Birmingham, Alabama, that said, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

“It is a truth that remains true even in the moments when we feel divided, in the moments when we cannot see any common ground, in the moments when even saying the word polarize feels trite,” said Schroeder. He added that if King could speak of hope and community even while watching life being taken, often brutally, “and still commit to a path of unwavering love, then today, of all days, let us remember we can, too.”

Norris said King tried to encourage people in and outside of the civil rights moment that a final victory would not come without setbacks.

“Do what you can to make America kind again and know that as Dr. King told us decades ago, chaos and community are on the menu but always, always, always choose community,” said Norris. “Always choose community.”

In 2010, Norris started “The Race Card Project,” soliciting postcards from people around the world to describe their ideas and experiences about race in six words, leading to the publication of a book last year called “Our Hidden Conversations: What Americans Really Think About Race and Identity.”

In an interview with Norris on stage, University of Minnesota School of Public Health Professor Rachel Hardeman said her six words were: “My Black daughter will experience liberation.” Hardeman researches how racism affects health outcomes and how to reduce inequities in maternal and infant health.

“What are your six words today?” she asked Norris.

Norris said that the phrase she comes back to all the time is: “Still more work to be done.”

A few miles south at another event marking MLK Day, spirits were high despite the subzero temperatures.

Inside the bright gymnasium at the Powderhorn Park Recreation Center, the Brass Solidarity community band had people dancing on their feet.

Some 600 visitors were expected to flow in and out of the south Minneapolis neighborhood’s 27th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration, where everyone could get a free meal catered by Chin Dian Kitchen and half a dozen artists were scheduled to perform.

Clapping and hollering to the jaunty belting of the sousaphone with smiles across their faces, the audience responded to the band’s call of, “Show me what community looks like!” with “This is what community looks like!”

Ray Curt Johnson of Brass Solidarity strutted down the aisle with a cowbell and tambourine. He’s a Washington, D.C., native who remembers his mother dressing him up to attend King’s March on Washington in 1963.

To anyone feeling a dearth of hope on this MLK Day, Johnson suggested staying focused on the right of freedom of speech and nonviolent protest.

“Unfortunately, we are a nation of division and economic warfare,” he said. “[King] was the exception, he was the voice that people needed to hear. It’s nonviolence, that’s what we need in the midst of all this.”

In the back of the gym, Grace Bichanga Larson sat with her 6-year-old son, Luca. They had come from Stillwater in search of an authentic community gathering on MLK Day.

Tears welled up in Bichanga Larson’s eyes as she watched the multi-racial crowd dance. She admitted that since the presidential election, she had doubted whether King’s dream was still alive or that the arc of the moral universe still bent toward justice.

“It just feels really scary and really dark. I look at my son, and I just feel scared,” she said. “But seeing so much Black joy and young boys, the gamut of people having fun, it’s all bubbling up now.”

Halfway through the morning, news began to spread through the gym that Joe Biden, as one of his final acts as president, had commuted the life sentence of American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier.

Tabitha Montgomery, executive director of the Powderhorn Park Neighborhood Association, said she hoped the MLK Day celebration would help the community reflect on King’s complete legacy.

“We’re sometimes encouraged to buy that he was only about the good work of justice building, and that he didn’t have an emotional response to injustice,” she said. “We laud him now more in his death than we ever did in his life, and that is the hard work of having something powerful to say that is not popular to say.”