This MLK Day is unique, but it still sends vital message

COVID-19 will prevent the traditional gatherings this year where people come together to recognize the teachings of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and recommit to them.

But this year, after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020 at the hands of police and the strife that followed in a deeply divided country, it is more important than ever that we take time to reflect on King’s message of equality and peaceful change while recognizing both how far we have come toward racial justice and how far we still must travel.

The Rev. Charles Becknell Sr. made both those points in a lengthy interview in Sunday’s Albuquerque Journal. Becknell, a minister with a doctorate in American studies from the University of New Mexico, grew up in segregated Hobbs.

He has been active with the New Mexico Black Leadership Conference, the Black Coalition and the NAACP.

While still in high school, he helped organize the first Black sit-ins at segregated Hobbs lunch counters. A lifelong advocate for nonviolent social change, he went on to serve at the highest levels of government under two New Mexico governors.

Now retired, he still delivers sermons at the Emmanuel Missionary Baptist Church in Rio Rancho, where his son is lead pastor.

While Becknell says conditions are much better today for the African-American community than when he was a child, he stresses the importance of developing a larger successful Black middle class.

His road map, which is being circulated in the Congressional Black Caucus in Washington, D.C., is not about reparations but about paths to accelerating social change through education and funding of historic Black colleges, homeownership, help for struggling Black-owned mom and pop farms, and African-American representation on major corporate boards.

“We need to get beyond talk of how you’re going to pay us off,” he said of reparations, and “shift the conversation to how to develop a strong Black middle class.”

While gatherings are mostly off the table this year, Becknell will host a program at 3 p.m. Monday on KUNM 89.9 FM featuring Bernard Lafayette Jr., chairman of the Southern Christian Leadership board of directors, a member of King’s staff and one of the Freedom Riders who fought to enforce federal integration laws on interstate bus routes in 1961, along with Bishop Calvin Wallace Woods Sr., who was a close personal friend and adviser to King and who worked to end segregation in Birmingham, Alabama.

This Martin Luther King Jr. Day we are a nation divided — where images of Black Americans killed at the hands of law enforcement, of a mob rampaging through the People’s House, of a deadly COVID-19 pandemic sweeping through communities of color at a greater rate than white communities, are seared into our consciousness.

And on this day, Becknell would urge us to look inside ourselves to reflect on King’s message. Because in King’s words, “Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that.”

And, as he pointed out, “the time is always right to do what is right.”