Martin Luther King (MLK) Jr. Day 2025 marks the holiday’s 40th observance. The theme, “Mission Possible: Protecting Freedom, Justice, and Democracy in the Spirit of Nonviolence 365,” is challenging in this politically polarized era. With this new presidency, we are called to reaffirm our values and hold them against a hard reality in order to provide a promise for future generations. 

Americans on the margins have the most to lose now in a country eroding, if not dismantling, decades-long civil rights gains that allowed protection and participation in an evolving multicultural democracy.

Related

Martin Luther King Jr. shows us how to harness the immense power of the queer community
King understood how to change hearts and minds. We must follow in his footsteps.

For King, protecting freedom, justice, and democracy was more than a racial, legal, or moral issue — it was a human issue. He passionately demonstrated this concern in his work on a wide range of social issues.

Never Miss a Beat

Subscribe to our newsletter to stay ahead of the latest LGBTQ+ political news and insights.
Subscribe to our Newsletter today

“The revolution for human rights is opening up unhealthy areas in American life and permitting a new and wholesome healing to take place,” King once told a racially mixed audience during his 1967 speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.”

“Eventually, the civil rights movement will have contributed infinitely more to the nation than eradicating racial injustice,” he said.

Moral leadership played a profound role in King’s justice work. He argued that authentic moral leadership must involve itself in the situations of all who are damned, disinherited, disrespected, and dispossessed. He also believed that moral leadership must be part of a participatory government that is feverishly working to dismantle any existing discriminatory laws that prevent full participation in the fight to advance democracy. 

However, if King were among us today, he would say that it is not enough to look outside ourselves to see the places where society is broken. It is not enough to talk about institutions and workplaces that fracture and separate people based on race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and other experiential lines. Oftentimes, these institutions and workplaces are broken, dysfunctional, and wounded in the same ways we are — the structures we’ve created mirror not who we want to be but who we are.

King would remind us that we cannot heal the world without healing ourselves. In light of King’s teachings, healing ourselves is the greatest task and the most difficult work we must do. This work must be done in relation to our justice work in the world.

In A Farewell to Arms — written during World War I — Ernest Hemingway said that the world breaks us all, but some of us grow strong in those broken places. King’s teachings invite us to grow strong in our broken places — not only to mend the unhealthy world we live in but also the unhealthy world we carry around within us.

“If you want to see love, be love. If you want to receive compassion, be compassionate. If you want respect, you have to show respect,” Bernice King said in an interview promoting her 2022 children’s book It Starts With Me.

Dr. Bernice A. King is the  CEO of The King Center and the youngest surviving daughter of MLK. ” Stop waiting on the next leader, the next Martin Luther King Jr. — it starts with you!”

I know that the struggle against racism that King talked about is only legitimate if I am also fighting anti-Semitism, homophobia, sexism, and classism — not only out in the world but also in myself. Otherwise, I am creating an ongoing cycle of abuse that goes on unexamined and unaccounted for.

We are foolish if we think we can heal the world and not ourselves. And we delude ourselves if we believe that King was only talking about the woundedness of institutional racism and not the personal wounds we all carry as human beings.

Ironically, our culture of woundedness and victimization has bonded us together in brokenness. Sharing wounds to depict and honor our pain has created a new language of intimacy, a bonding ritual some feel more able to trust. When we “trauma bond” only in these unhealthy ways, we miss opportunities to work collaboratively with others to effect change in seemingly small ways that eventually lead to significant outcomes — for ourselves and our communities.

When we use our gifts to serve others, as King has taught us, we shift the paradigm of personal brokenness to personal healing. We also shift the paradigm of looking for moral leadership from outside of ourselves to within ourselves, thus realizing that we are not only the agents of change in society but also the moral leaders we have been looking for.

Therefore, our job in keeping King’s dream alive is to remember that our longing for social justice remains also inextricably tied to our longing for personal healing — and it starts with you.

Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.