This article, by Adriene Thorne and Brandon Thomas Crowley, was originally published by Religion News Service.
The U.S. has created two Martin Luther Kings. One is a revolutionary in the way Christ was; the other is a sanitized, color-blind counterfeit. The real King was not a passive visionary. He was a radical agitator who called for reparations, challenged the moral legitimacy of the American empire and named whiteness as a system of power sustained by racial ignorance. King’s clarity feels especially urgent in these first weeks of 2026.