People ask me, what do you think your father is doing?
He imagines his late father thinking, What the heck is going on?
Me, my team, we opened doors that should never be closed.
Martin Luther King III speaks following the Peace Walk in celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day in Washington, DC on January 17, 2022.Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images
And yet were going, it feels backwards at least temporarily.
Every day something else comes out thats more extreme than the last thing.
And, so, our work is cut out for us.
(L-R) Martin Luther King III, Arndrea Waters King, Jocelyn Benson, Ralph G. Neas and Bradley Tusk attend the “Featured Session: Voting is a Civil Rights Issue” at SXSW on March 13, 2023 in Austin, Texas.Photo by Chris Saucedo/Getty Images for SXSW
Waters King added, Our daughter is the only grandchild of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King.
Shes 14 years old, shell be 15 in May.
Waters King highlighted another retrograde action impacting young people like her daughter.
Legislation that has been passed in Georgia on what can be taught in schools, Waters King said.
She and her peers are not being taught history.
This amounts to writing Black history out, MLK III says flatly.
(School officials denied the students allegations).
And yet you cant teach history anymore.
You cant even talk about these things according to what this school did.
Youve got to look at how are we selecting police officers?
How are we training police officers?
In other words, human relations, sensitivity, diversity and several other areas.
He also advocates rotating police off hazardous beats, much like soldiers are rotated off the battlefield.
He also urges independent mechanisms for investigating police misconduct.
So, they have a cozy relationship.
How then, when a policeman does something wrong, are you expected to prosecute this?
You dont have that objectivity.
You need an independent prosecutor.
He adds, You [also] need community policing.
This is whatProtect/Serveshould be about.
Corporate America was beginning to change, King observed.
Diversity, equity and inclusion departments were funded and resources were allocated.
But progress has stalled, or even reversed, it could be argued.
The national debate has switched from addressing systemic injustice to debates over critical race theory and woke-ism.
That was what he said.
He never talked about America being great or great again, because nobody knows when that was.
MLK III, who lost his father when he was just 10, has seen backlash before.
Dad used to say, were at a point that oppressions being legislated.
The sad part is, were still there, that we have not moved further, he commented.
He also understood the inevitable backlash when theres progress.
So, [theres] inevitable pushback.
Arndrea Waters King still sees some reason to remain hopeful.
At the end of the day, there are more people of goodwill.
There really are more people of goodwill than not.
The work they intend to do with Calabasas Films going forward will help rally those forces of goodwill.
We have to struggle on more than one front.
