Opinion: We need King’s message as much today as in 1965: ‘How long? Not long’

President Kennedy once posed the question: What is it to be an American today when our people are divided as never before? Martin Luther King, who’d walked for five days and 54 miles only to be beaten and bloodied by police as they crossed the Selma bridge. King amplifies Maya Angelou’s words, “We may encounter many defeats, but we must not be defeated,” and elevates its message with a divine calling for the civil rights movement, that in the difficult and challenging moments of protest, in the frustrating hour, let us remain committed to struggle. Opinion Op-Ed: What King would say to Black Lives Matter activists today Martin Luther King Jr. understood that the official power of the state to punish and murder Black people was fatal for a democracy. Decades later, when police brutality would kidnap the American dream, turn it into a recurring nightmare for brown and Black boys being blown away like sand in a windstorm, human beings across the globe would heed King’s directive to walk together, children, because we could not allow these travesties to become “normal.” Between the covers of the Rev.