This year, we will celebrate the 250th Anniversary of the creation of our nation. Also, this year, on January 19, 2026, we will celebrate the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Day. Both observations will be about the same thing: holding those in power accountable for their actions.

Unjust Laws

Colonists gathered in Boston on March 5, 1770, to protest the presence of troops from Great Britain that had been sent to protect British officials and enforce British legislation passed without any input from the colonies. The soldiers were harassed; people threw snowballs and verbally abused them until a shot rang out. A British regular had discharged his weapon. Five people would be killed that day. That was the beginning of the revolution that would be the genesis for our country. A country that declared that all people were created equal and were endowed with certain unalienable rights: the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

During his lifetime, MLK asserted the same rights. He stood against unjust segregation laws that would not allow black people to sit at a lunch counter, use the same bathrooms and drinking fountains, and vote in the same elections as white people. 

When he organized the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, he gave this reason for the protest in what would be called his I Have a Dream speech, “In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men—yes, black men as well as white men—would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”

The Blame Game

In both instances, the powers that be responded with threats and violence. In both instances, some people argued that the protesters were responsible for the ensuing violence. In colonial times, some justified the king’s harshness because he was the one who was trying to maintain order, while the rebels were the ones breaking the law. During the civil rights protest, demonstrators were told not to march in order to avoid confrontation with the local police.

King found that assertion absurd, writing in his Letters from a Birmingham Jail, “In your statement you asserted that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But can this assertion be logically made? Isn’t this like condemning the robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery?” 

True Colors

The non-violent protests that MLK led revealed the true nature of the people in power who opposed them, just as the Revolution revealed the true nature of the British authorities who opposed the formation of the United States. Both the Southern authorities and the British government held power to benefit themselves, not to improve the lives of those they served, and they asserted their power to control them using any means necessary. Those who participated in the Civil Rights Movement and the American Revolution rejected those ideas and insisted that those in power use their power to serve the people. That is the great  sentiment expressed by Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address, where he said we should be devoted to the American experiment of having a government, “…of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

That devotion is best demonstrated when we hold those in power accountable for the use of that power.