Dr. King Reminded Us That Progress Through Resistance and Protest Is Never a Straight Line
April 04, 2025
Editor’s note: Gloria J. Browne-Marshall delivered a version of this keynote address at LibLearnX’s twenty-sixth annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday Observance and Sunrise Celebration event in Phoenix, Arizona, on January 26, 2025. We share it here in observation of the anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination and his ongoing legacy.
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The God I serve does not live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, run a multinational corporation, or control social media empires. As we bear witness to the schemes and diabolical machinations of this administration, we each shift through stages of grieving our loss, feelings of despair, depression, shock, trepidation and numbness, isolation and hopelessness, rage and even hatred.
We face shameless greed, avarice, racism, xenophobia, misogyny and a blatant disregard for Constitutional principles or civil society, spreading like locusts across the land. With each new policy, our hopes for a brighter future drift further away. Wealth and cruelty may be the brand of some people, but it is not a shield of invincibility. We must protest.
If control of Congress were all it took, women would never have won the right to vote in 1920 when men controlled all three branches of government. Women fought. They resisted. They protested, pushed and carved a path forward. Our Indigenous brothers and sisters know this struggle best. For over 500 years, they have fought to preserve their languages, religions, sacred lands and culture. They resisted. They protested. They survived and still fought. They carved a path forward.
Protest done right is effective, but never easy. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded us that progress is never a straight line. Dr. King would have been ninety-six years old this year had an assassin’s bullet not stolen his life at thirty-nine. In his final speech, he acknowledged, “Longevity has its place.” Yet he, like so many Civil Rights martyrs, sacrificed that longevity so we could live in a better world. They believed in resistance. They believed in protest.
Dr. King was in Memphis, Tennessee, leading a protest for sanitation workers fighting to form a union when his life was taken. Through resistance and protest, those workers stood their ground, just as workers across the nation continue to do. Without resistance and protest, there would be no unions. As I stand here today, grateful for all that has been won, I wonder if we truly understand our role in the fight for social justice. I worry that those who have been given much now assume progress will march forward without their effort. In 1968, Beacon Press published Dr. King’s final book, Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community? I say: community.
A year before his death, Dr. King gave us our marching orders, posing the same question we must answer today: Where do we go from here? Chaos or community? Dr. King knew, even then, that the nation was slipping away from its short-lived promises of equality. Yes, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, but to many White Americans, “equality” meant only slight improvement for Black lives, not true equity in politics and society. As Dr. King observed, too many of them believed that democracy is not worth having if it means equality.
In 1967, many Americans had no desire to share the nation’s opportunities equally. They believed their skin color entitled them to a larger portion, assuming that tossing a few crumbs from the table of plenty would be enough. It was not. So, there was resistance. To tell Black people to stop protesting in the streets is to demand our silence, King said. But as Dr. King reminded us, “Freedom is not won by passive acceptance of suffering. Freedom is won by a struggle against suffering.”
I am a proud African American, a descendant of those kidnapped and tortured, held in bondage to work from can’t see to can’t see—before the sun rose to after it set—for free, for others and were killed if they did not do it. Yet, they resisted and protested. They rose up against all odds of success when the murder of people of color carried no criminal consequences. When Congress, the Supreme Court, and the White House were all controlled by slaveholders. When some states chose war over freeing human beings from bondage. When the very Constitution enshrined a Fugitive Slave Clause, and federal law made freedom a crime while slavery remained the law of the land, they resisted.
Women, men, and children protested. Frederick Douglass, formerly enslaved, said, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess freedom but deprecate agitation . . . want crops without plowing up the ground, rain without thunder and lightning. Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and never will.” Progress has never come through wishful thinking or idle complaints. The arc of the moral universe may be long, but it does not bend toward justice on its own, it bends because we force it to.
What are we resisting today? The answer is painful. We are confronting a regime, a self-declared dictator with no regard for democracy. This administration bows to leadership driven by revenge, self-worship, and the relentless pursuit of ill-gotten wealth with warmongering as its economic strategy. I see policies on the horizon designed to crush the working class into serfdom, shove our gay kinfolk back into the closet, deport immigrants, turn the working class into footstools for the rich, pressure White women into baby-making machines, and condemn Black Americans to Jim Crow servitude, mass incarceration and a cycle of death.
Why? Progress frightens some people. Women in positions of power. Barack Obama’s two terms as president. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joining the US Supreme Court alongside Justices Sotomayor, the first Latina, and Kagan. The presence of gender, racial, ethnic and religious diversity in academia, government, corporate leadership, sports, the arts, and nonprofits. Some believed White male dominance was the American Dream. Never mind that it was built on violence and unjust laws. To some, equality felt like oppression. The looming reality of 2045, when people of color become the majority in the United States, is so terrifying that they are resurrecting racial apartheid. A system that took root here with Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, then reached its full horror in South Africa, a nightmare that only ended in 1990 through relentless protest and resistance.
The symbolism of Dr. King Day and the presidential inauguration falling on January 20 remains a bright and shining light, a North Star guiding us forward, urging us to build a future beyond their empty rhetoric. Go boldly into battle. Reject defeatism before the fight even begins. Slave masters knew that if they controlled the mind, they could eliminate the will to resist. Stand up. Protest, because power does not belong solely to the wealthy, the corporate elite, or the politicians. Yes, with money comes certain power, but we hold power too.
Each of us, multiplied by millions across this nation, holds power. We have the right to free speech, to assemble, to petition the government for a redress of grievances, a right so often overlooked, enshrined in the final line of the First Amendment. To petition is to demand. To seek redress and insist on a remedy. This is not a privilege; it is our right. We must use it! I don’t know about you. But to borrow from Dylan Thomas, “I am not going gentle into that good night.”
My great-great-grandmother Eliza was born into slavery in Kentucky in the 1830s. As a child, she was torn from her mother and sold. As a teenager, she was sold again to Mr. and Mrs. Christian. Yes, the Christians. Her life was consumed by free labor, cooking, cleaning, and tending to every need of her enslavers and their children. One day, exhausted, she sat down. Mrs. Christian picked up a broom handle and cracked it against Eliza’s head. Then she beat her with the broken stick, pinned her down and poured salt into the open wounds. That evening, over dinner, Mr. and Mrs. Christian calmly discussed how severely Eliza should be whipped for her “impudence” and “laziness.” When Mr. Christian finished his meal, he calmly rose, walked to the kitchen and reached for the horse whip kept above the door. But Eliza had plans of her own. As they dined, she set a pot to boil, just as she boiled inside.
When Mr. Christian reached for the whip, Eliza seized the pot and hurled the scalding water onto him, then onto Mrs. Christian. I can only imagine the screaming, the fussing, the cursing. But they never laid a hand on her again. She lived to see the end of the Civil War. She lived to see freedom. And she became an Exoduster, journeying from Kentucky to Kansas in the first great Black migration of the 1870s, a protest against the night riders and terrorist groups burning newly built schools in the South.
We all come from ancestors who showed courage beyond measure. Call on them. The suffragists. The immigrants. The first union organizers. The anti-war demonstrators. Those who stood against police violence. Look to history. Find courage between the pages. Where do we go from here, chaos or community? I choose community. Dr. King warned us: “Today our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant, and to face the challenge of change.” In 1967, King warned us to stay woke.
We must protest. We must resist. We must remain vigilant in defending the rights won by generations before us. These rights were not gifts, not favors from benevolent rulers. Look to history, regular people fought back against oppression. We, the people, seized our rights. We, the people, protested and resisted. We planned. We marched. We demanded. We litigated. We voted. We stood our ground.
The eight-hour workday wasn’t handed down; it was won through decades of protest. Our rights require action. Stand. Kneel. Organize. Resist. When they ban our books, we build Freedom Schools in our living rooms. And we remind those in political office that re-election is not guaranteed. Those who can must march outside the White House, every day, just as women did to win the vote. We must write, march, strategize, unite with resistors across the nation: college students, clergy, seniors, veterans, women, unions. Rise and be heard!
And Black women, again, we are forced to save this country. Our very survival is a protest. We, who carry the twin burdens of racism and sexism every day yet push forward anyway. We, my sisters, will be hit hardest by these policies, so we must hit back harder. Act where your passion runs deepest. Choose battles where your power shines. There is no shortage of injustice, enough tragedy for everyone to take a piece. But simmering in silence is not resistance. Complaining without action is not progress. Without a vision, the people will perish. Envision a world where people are safe, respected, with opportunity and justice for all. We dream a world with access to education that springs forward higher levels of literacy.
Dr. King was often dismayed by the silence of good people, those who grumble among friends but refuse to step forward. We are witness to sinful hypocrisy unfold as some weaponize the strength of our democracy to destroy it because our democracy is not worth having when equality comes with it. The insult of that knowledge runs deep. But rage alone is not enough. Turn that fury into action. We, the people, fought for freedom, equality and justice. Too many gave their lives for the rights we hold today. Honor their sacrifice. Embrace your power. Resist. Protest. The movement is forward.
About the Author
Gloria J. Browne-Marshall is an Emmy Award-winning writer, an educator, a legal advocate, and a playwright. She is the author of A Protest History of the United States, releasing April 2025 from Beacon Press.