It was first proposed four days after King's 1968 assassination outside a Memphis motel. It took 15 years until it became a federal holiday.

The dual celebrations of a second Trump inauguration and the civil rights leader’s birth raise profound questions about Black leadership and progress toward the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream.

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds.” -- Abraham Lincoln, March 4, 1865.