On Martin Luther King Jr. Day — a holiday meant to honor the life, sacrifice, and nonviolent struggle of a man who changed America — former President Barack Obama took to X to laud King’s dedication to justice and equity (not equality, which is what MLK would have said). In his post, Obama wrote that King “taught us that even in the face of intimidation and discrimination, we must never stop working towards a better future” and urged Americans to “speak out and stand up for what we believe in.”
Yet the defining component of King’s civil rights movement – nonviolence – was noticeably absent from Obama’s post.
At face value, there’s nothing controversial in calling for persistence in the pursuit of justice. King himself knew well the long and painful road toward civil rights. But that broad framing becomes deeply problematic — even inappropriate — when it’s implicitly or explicitly used to justify or legitimize ongoing violent protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) actions in Minneapolis and beyond, where clashes have included thrown projectiles, disruption of religious worship, and aggressive confrontation with law enforcement.
Despite enduring questions about his personal behavior and the particulars of his theology, Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy is rooted in nonviolence. King’s philosophy of resistance was clear and consistent: change comes through peaceful protest grounded in love and respect for human dignity, not through force or intimidation. His commitment to nonviolent civil disobedience was not merely strategic; it was moral, rooted in Christian convictions about the sanctity of life and the wrongness of harming another human. To suggest through implication that King “would have supported” aggressive or violent protest tactics — even implicitly — is a distortion of that fundamental principle.
King rejected violence not as a concession to political opponents but as an expression of the belief that every human — even one who is unjust or oppressive — retains dignity as an image-bearer of God. This conviction undergirds his insistence that protestors refrain from retaliation and instead appeal to the conscience of the broader community through peaceful witness. In contrast, recent anti-ICE demonstrations have seen throwing objects at officers, hazardous conditions created for law enforcement, violent arrests, and disruptive clashes, even to the point of storming a church sanctuary during worship.
There is no question that Americans can disagree about federal immigration enforcement — including the role and conduct of ICE agents — and those disagreements can and should be expressed peacefully in a democratic society. But equating resistance with violence and then invoking MLK to implicitly encourage violent and lawless protesters is a moral misstep. It ignores the very reason King’s methods were effective: their moral clarity and restraint, even in the face of brutality.
By appropriating King’s name in broad calls to “stand up” without context, public figures risk diluting what King actually stood for — a disciplined, principled, peaceful pursuit of justice. Worse, they risk encouraging a generation to think that “justice” is achieved through disorder rather than through orderly civic engagement, legislative reform, and appeals to conscience.
History demands honesty. King led peaceful marches, sit-ins, and mass protests in the face of violent opposition. He counseled against hate, even toward those who arrested, spat on, or attacked him. That kind of radical love and patient fortitude is not the same as confronting federal agents with force, disrupting public order, or endorsing tactics that put others at risk.
As was seen during the 2020 Black Lives Matter rioting, Marxists like Obama have historically been all too happy hiding behind the supposed rhetoric of non-violence while their comrades do exactly the opposite.
