The coincidence that Martin Luther King Jr. Day falls on the same Monday as Donald Trump’s inauguration is no cause for concern, according to Bernice King, the daughter of the late civil rights icon.
In an interview with MSNBC’s “The Weekend” on Saturday, he said the moment provides an opportunity to reflect on his father’s legacy as the United States transitions to a new administration.
“It’s wonderful that this happens on King’s holiday, the inauguration, because it reminds us of King,” said Bernice King, the youngest of Martin Luther King’s four children and who was five years old when her father was assassinated in 1968. “It takes us back to King. He says, ‘When we move forward, we have to do it in the spirit of King.'”
There has only been one overlap between the federal holiday (established in 1983 and first observed in 1986) and Inauguration Day on two other occasions. The first was during President Bill Clinton’s inauguration in 1997, and the second was during Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2013. Obama also took the oath of office using a Bible that had belonged to King himself.
Bernice King, who has criticized Trump in the past for his divisive rhetoric, addressed those who feel “defeated” amid the impending inauguration and asked Americans to “stay focused on the goal” of the no. violence, a value defended by his father.
“We have to develop strategies. We have lost the strategy. We have missed the spirit of Dr. King,” Bernice King said. “Dr. King’s spirit is nonviolence. And nonviolence is not just a position, it is a way of thinking. For us, we define it as a love-centered way of thinking, speaking, acting and participating that leads to personal, cultural and social transformation.”
Martin Luther King III, King’s eldest son, also addressed the moment and urged Trump to “be in dialogue with everyone,” not just his supporters.
“If you said you wanted to be a unifier, then those who didn’t support you, you need to get closer to them or allow them to get closer to you,” the younger King said on “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “In my opinion, we do not reflect the ‘United States’ of America at this time.”
The King family has long been open critics of Trump. In August, Trump compared the crowd at his “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021, before his supporters stormed the Capitol, to the 1963 March on Washington, where King gave his legendary “I Have a Speech.” dream” from the Lincoln Memorial.
“If you look at Martin Luther King, when he gave his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours, you will see the same real estate, the same everything, the same number of people,” he said during a press conference at Mar-a-Lago . .
Although Trump acknowledged that official estimates recorded a smaller crowd at his rally compared to the March on Washington, he said, “If you look at it and look at the photo of my crowd… we actually had more people.”
Bernice King bluntly refuted the comment, calling it “absolutely false.”
“I really wish people would stop using my father to support fallacies,” he wrote on X at the time.
Trump’s crowd was about 53,000, according to the Jan. 6 congressional committee. That’s about a fifth of the estimated 250,000 people who attended King’s 1963 speech.
During Martin Luther King Day celebrations in 2018, the civil rights leader’s children condemned then-President Trump, particularly disparaging comments he made about African countries during a meeting with senators about immigration.
“When a president insists that our nation needs more citizens from white states like Norway, I don’t even think we need to spend time talking about what he says and what he is,” Martin Luther King III said at the time. “We have to find a way to work on this man’s heart.”
