Monday, January 19, 2026
MLK Jr. and out challenges today
Usually I use Mondays to recap the haiku from the previous Friday. There were some great ones last week, and I invite you to go back and read them-- but right now, I am going to turn to something else.
Several years ago, on the 50th anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I wrote a piece for the Memphis Law Review titled "Short of the Mountaintop." You can read that here. A thesis of that article was that despite the claims of Trump (first term) officials, the dream of racial equality and equity had not been achieved in the United States.
Now, it seems we are even further away from that mountaintop, as in my city people are stopped and detained because of their race and ethnicity in "Kavanaugh stops," and DEI is demonized and the very mention of it scrubbed from official documents in the federal system.
The memory of MLK raises this question: Who will be the leader to take us from this rolling tragedy?
