KINGS’ words counter rhetoric.
Trump remarks decried; Freedmen gain Cherokee citizenship
ATLANTA — Martin Luther King Jr.’s children and the pastor of an Atlanta church where he preached decried disparaging remarks President Donald Trump is said to have made about African countries, while protests between Haitian immigrants and Trump supporters broke out near the president’s Florida resort Monday, the official federal holiday honoring King.
At gatherings across the nation, activists, residents and teachers honored the late civil-rights leader on what would have been his 89th birthday and ahead of the 50th anniversary of his assassination in Memphis. In Oklahoma, the Cherokee Nation marked Martin Luther King Jr. Day with events aimed at coming to terms with its own history of slavery and by welcoming descendants of former slaves into the tribe.
Trump faces claims that during a meeting with senators on immigration last week, he used a vulgarity to describe African countries and questioned the need to allow more Haitians into the U.S. He also is said to have asked why the country couldn’t have more immigrants from nations like Norway.
In Washington, King’s eldest son, Martin Luther King III, criticized Trump, saying, “When a president insists that our nation needs more citizens from white states like Norway, I don’t even think we need to spend any time even talking about what it says and what it is.”
He added, “We got to find a way to work on this man’s heart.”
In Atlanta, King’s daughter, the Rev. Bernice King, told hundreds of people who packed the pews of the Ebenezer Baptist Church that they “cannot allow the nations of the world to embrace the words that come from our president as a reflection of the true spirit of America.”
“We are one people, one nation, one blood, one destiny. … All of civilization and humanity originated from the soils of Africa,” Bernice King said. “Our collective voice in this hour must always be louder than the one who sometimes does not reflect the legacy of my father.”
She urged people to remember her father by doing “an act of kindness toward someone of another race” between now and April 4, the day he was assassinated in 1968.
She asked people to “connect and find a sense of humanity in each other.” And she said it’s time for what she called a “New Year’s revolution of values in our souls” and to honor her father by finishing the work “that he was not able to finish.”
Church pastor the Rev. Raphael Warnock also took issue with Trump’s campaign slogan to “Make America Great Again.”
Warnock said he thinks America “is already great … in large measure because of Africa and African people.”
Down the street from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago retreat in Palm Beach, Fla., on Monday, Haitian protesters and Trump supporters yelled at each other from opposing corners. Trump was staying at the resort for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend. Police kept the sides apart.
Trump dedicated his weekly address to the nation, released Monday, to King.
“Dr. King’s dream is our dream, it is the American dream, it’s the promise stitched into the fabric of our nation, etched into the hearts of our people and written into the soul of humankind,” he said in the address, which he tweeted to his followers. “It is the dream of a world where people are judged by who they are, not how they look or where they come from.”
Former Vice President Joe Biden said American values are being challenged in present times but that King’s leadership provides an example of how to respond.
Biden was the keynote speaker Monday at the Delaware State Bar Association’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day breakfast in Wilmington.
The News Journal reported that Biden criticized Trump’s response to white nationalist rallies last August in Charlottesville, Va., and his recent reported use of an obscenity.
But he said he believes Americans are ready to respond and re-establish the nation’s “moral fabric.”
Biden said now is the time to “remind ourselves who we are as Americans.”
The Cherokee Nation tribe — one of the country’s largest — marked the King holiday on Monday with calls to service and by confronting its slave-owning past. A federal court ruled last year that the descendants of former slaves, known as Freedmen, had the same rights to tribal citizenship, voting, health care and housing as bloodline Cherokees.
Cherokee Secretary of State Chuck Hoskin Jr. visited the Martin Luther King Community Center in Muskogee, Okla., and spoke how King’s message of civil rights resonates with American Indians.
“The time is now to deal with it and talk about it,” said Hoskin. “It’s been a positive thing for our country to reconcile that during Dr. King’s era, and it’s going to be a positive thing for Cherokees to talk about that history as part of reconciling our history with slavery.”
One descendant of Freedmen, Rodslen Brown-King, said her mother was able to vote as a Cherokee for the first and only time recently. Other relatives died before getting the benefits that come with tribal citizenship, including a 34-year-old nephew with stomach cancer, she said.
“He was waiting on this decision,” said Brown-King of Fort Gibson, Okla. “It’s just a lot of struggle, a lot of up and down trauma in our lives. It’s exciting to know we are coming together and moving forward in this.”
Information for this article was contributed by Terry Spencer, Russell Contreras,Alicia Fonseca and Corey R. Williams of The Associated Press.