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 the 47th president of the United States.
“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 attendees heard a message of unity amid a divided and contentious political climate even as Trump’s swearing-in was seldom mentioned directly.
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,” Schroeder said.
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 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.