MLK DAY IN U$A
It’s Time Again for Good Trouble
Today we honor the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr.
Trump has removed MLK Jr.’s birthday from the National Park Service’s fee-free days and substituted his own birthday of June 14 as a fee-free day.
I write this more in sorrow than in anger.
All told, I feel profound sorrow for America. Sorrow for the people of Minneapolis who are enduring this Trump-made hell. Sorrow for Renee Good’s three children and wife.
I also feel sorrow for Greenlanders and Venezuelans and others around the world fearing what the sociopath in the Oval Office may do next. Sorrow for everyone justifiably worried about the future of America and the planet because of him.
I’m old enough to remember when Martin Luther King Jr.’s mission seemed impossible. Just as the mission you and I must now engage in — defeating Trumpism and creating a new and better America out of the rubble and chaos he is wreaking — may seem impossible at this moment.
Martin Luther King Jr. accomplished more than anyone thought he could when he began. He did it with patience and perseverance, with the strength of conviction. He did it with calmness, reason, and quiet passion.
And he did it with civil disobedience — what one of his assistants, the late great congressman John Lewis, called “good trouble.”
Good trouble meant mobilizing the nation against racial injustice by making sure almost everyone saw its horrors. Night after night on the news — watching peaceful civil rights marchers getting clobbered by white supremacists.
I remember watching Bull Connor, commissioner of public safety in Birmingham, and his goons use firehoses and attack dogs against Black people — including children — who were peacefully standing up for their rights.
The scenes horrified America and much of the world. Yet were it not for our painful national exposure to racist brutality, we wouldn’t have gotten the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act.
I’ve been thinking of those scenes as I’ve watched ICE thugs patrolling Minneapolis. Watched armed agents pulling people out of cars, using chokeholds, demanding proof of citizenship. Masked agents in unmarked vehicles grabbing neighbors off the streets, using tear gas and pepper spray, shooting innocent people exercising their First Amendment rights to protest.
This time it isn’t Bull Connor and his racist goons. It’s Donald Trump, JD Vance, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and their fascist goons. It’s armed agents of the president of the United States who are bullying and brutalizing people. Committing a cold-blooded murder of a middle-class white woman in broad daylight who tried to get out of their way. Shooting and injuring others.
This time it’s Trump and the thugs around him making up stories to justify this brutality, lying about the protester’s motives, and threatening even more brutality.
Take a wider look and you see their lawless bullying on a different scale: a criminal investigation of the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board for failing to lower interest rates as fast as Trump wants. Criminal investigations of U.S. senators and representatives for telling America’s soldiers that they don’t have to follow illegal orders. Criminal investigations of the governor of Minnesota and mayor of Minneapolis for refusing to cooperate with Trump’s brown shirts.
The Justice Department searching the home of a Washington Post reporter and seizing her laptops and other devices.
Trump raising tariffs on our trusted allies — until and unless they support him in taking over Greenland. Greenland!
A crazy old man saying “fuck you, fuck you” and giving the finger to an American factory worker who criticizes him in public. The crazy old man is president of the United States, and the worker has been suspended from his job because he dared criticize that crazy old man.
I remember the good trouble that occurred 65 years ago. I believe it’s time for it again. Time for all of us — every one of us — to cause it.
What kind of good trouble?
A huge national demonstration, far larger than anything before. Everyone in the streets.
A giant general strike where we stop purchasing all products for two weeks (stocking up beforehand).
A massive boycott of all businesses sucking up to Trump.
A coordinated effort to get all our employers, our churches and synagogues, our unions, our universities to condemn this madness.
A loud demand that our members of Congress impeach and convict him of his high crimes.
There is no longer any neutral place to stand. Either you’re standing up for democracy, the rule of law, and social justice, or you’re complicit in the fascist mayhem Trump has unleashed.
That, for me, is the lesson of all this.
Trump and his thugs have brought us to this point. They are the Bull Connors of today.
We stand with the people of Minneapolis and with the people of every other town and city where Trump’s thugs are prowling or will prowl, and where people are resisting.
We stand with the citizens of Greenland and Venezuela. With Canadians and Europeans. With every nation now threatened by Trump’s lawless abuses of power.
We stand proudly and sturdily everywhere the bright lights of freedom and truth still shine.
We will overcome the darkness of Trump’s fascism. We reject the hate, the bigotry, the fear, and the murderous lawlessness of his regime. We dedicate ourselves to causing good trouble — ending this mayhem, and building a new and better America.
MLK’s Strugge Against Policing and Surveillance Is Still Alive in Memphis Today
Every year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, elected officials quote King while standing safely at a distance from the risks he embraced. His name is invoked, his image sanitized, and his politics stripped of urgency. The U.S. celebrates a softened King who spoke about love but not power, unity but not confrontation, peace but not disruption. What we rarely confront is this truth: Martin Luther King Jr. was not merely misunderstood in his time. He was actively surveilled, criminalized, and treated as a threat to the hegemonic order in the U.S.
That history is not behind us. It is unfolding again.
In recent weeks, shootings involving federal agents connected to immigration enforcement and homeland security operations in Minneapolis and Portland have raised urgent questions about the expanding reach of federal policing, the militarization of law enforcement, and the dangers of unchecked surveillance powers. These incidents are not isolated. They exist within a long arc of state authority asserting itself most aggressively where dissent, migration, and racialized resistance converge.
To understand this moment, we must tell the truth about King’s.
Under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI conducted an extensive campaign of surveillance against Martin Luther King Jr.: King’s phones were tapped. His movements were tracked. His private life was scrutinized and weaponized. Hoover famously described King as “the most dangerous Negro in America,” not because King was violent, but because he was effective. Hoover feared what he called the rise of a “Black Messiah” — a leader capable of unifying Black people across class lines and mobilizing moral resistance to state violence, economic exploitation, and militarism.
King was not targeted because he preached hate. He was targeted because he preached liberation.
This repression intensified as King moved beyond civil rights rhetoric into structural critique. When he opposed the Vietnam War, organized the Poor People’s Campaign, and challenged economic inequality, King crossed an invisible line. He became not just a moral voice, but a political threat. Surveillance was the state’s response.
That logic did not end with Hoover. It evolved.
I know this not as distant history, but as lived reality. In Memphis, beginning around 2016 and intensifying through 2017 and 2018, people organizing for racial justice found ourselves under police surveillance because of our participation in collective efforts demanding accountability, transparency, and criminal justice reform. Faith leaders, grassroots organizers, and activists connected to the Movement for Black Lives-aligned efforts were engaged in lawful, nonviolent organizing when the Memphis Police Department tracked protests, monitored social media pages, and documented organizing strategies. What should have been protected civic engagement was treated as a threat.
Leaders praise King’s dream while avoiding his demands. They quote his words while rejecting his method. They honor his memory while reproducing the conditions that made him vulnerable to state violence in the first place.
I was later called to testify in federal court against Memphis Police Department’s unlawful surveillance practices, and it was revealed that even our church — Abyssinian Baptist Church — had been illegally surveilled. Spaces meant for worship, organizing, and sanctuary became zones of scrutiny. These experiences were later acknowledged by the Department of Justice’s pattern-and-practice investigation, which documented systemic constitutional violations, including improper surveillance and the targeting of Black activists and communities. The lesson was unmistakable: surveillance is not abstract. It is personal, local, and routinely deployed to suppress Black political dissent rather than protect public safety.
Today, we witness new forms of state surveillance justified under the language of “public safety,” “border security,” and “anti-terrorism.” Federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement operate with extraordinary discretion, often in communities already intensely policed and under-protected. When federal agents are deployed to cities without transparency or accountability, and when violence follows, the public is told to trust the process rather than interrogate the power.
But history teaches us otherwise.
Nowhere is this more painful or more revealing than in Memphis.
Memphis is the city where King was assassinated. It is also a city where police were found to have violated a federal consent decree by spying on protesters and activists. It is a city currently living under the weight of an expanded, militarized policing apparatus that many residents would describe as occupation. The Memphis (un)Safe Task Force, with its broad authority and opaque metrics, reflects the same logic that once framed King himself as a threat to be monitored rather than a prophet to be heard.
This is not coincidence. It is continuity.
Let’s remember that King did not inherit a tradition of quiet faith; rather, he stood firmly within the Black Prophetic Tradition. This tradition insists that faith is inseparable from justice, that love without truth is hollow, and that peace without accountability is false. It is a tradition that confronts power, exposes hypocrisy, and names systems (not just individuals) as sites of sin.
The Black Prophetic Tradition refuses the lie that order is more sacred than justice. It rejects the idea that safety can be built on surveillance alone. It insists that democracy is not secured by force but by trust, participation, and dignity. And it understands that when the state treats Black resistance as criminal, it is often because that resistance is effective.
This is why King unsettled those in power. And it is why his legacy remains threatening when taken seriously.
Yet today, King’s name is often used to legitimize policies he would have opposed. MLK Day becomes a “day of service” rather than a day of confrontation. Leaders praise King’s dream while avoiding his demands. They quote his words while rejecting his method. They honor his memory while reproducing the conditions that made him vulnerable to state violence in the first place.
The recent shootings perpetrated by federal agents in Minneapolis and Portland should force us to ask difficult questions about the expanding role of federal policing and surveillance in U.S. life. But in Memphis, those questions carry added weight. What does it mean to invoke King while tolerating unchecked policing? What does it mean to honor a man assassinated under state surveillance while refusing to protect civil liberties today?
The answers are uncomfortable, but necessary.
What does it mean to honor a man assassinated under state surveillance while refusing to protect civil liberties today?
If Memphis leaders truly wish to honor King, they must do more than quote him. They must develop the political consciousness and courage to protect the rights of those most vulnerable to state overreach. That means prioritizing transparency over theater, accountability over aggression, and justice over optics.
Given that neither federal nor state administrations can be relied upon, organizers in Memphis are calling for aggressive court challenges, civil rights litigation, injunctions, and independent investigations to force transparency, halt unlawful surveillance, and regulate joint task force operations. Justice, in concrete terms, looks like disaggregated public data, unmasked federal agents, an end to racial profiling and broken-windows policing, and sustained legal pressure that makes unconstitutional practices costly, visible, and ultimately untenable — demands that apply nationally because the mechanisms of aggressive policing are national.
King warned us that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” He also warned that militarism and racism were twin threats to democracy. Those warnings were not abstract. They were rooted in lived experience, prophetic insight, and political clarity.
King was not assassinated because he was misunderstood. He was assassinated because he was clear.
If we are serious about honoring his legacy, clarity — not comfort — must guide us now.
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