MLK Day 2025 marks the 40th holiday observance. The theme, “Mission Possible: Protecting Freedom, Justice, and Democracy in the Spirit of Nonviolence365,” is challenging in this politically polarized era. With this new presidency, we are called to reaffirm our values and hold them against a hard reality that provides a promise for future generations.

Americans on the margins have the most to lose now in a country eroding, if not dismantling, decades-long civil rights gains that were allowing protection and participation in an evolving multicultural democracy.

For King, protecting freedom, justice, and democracy was more than a racial, legal, or moral issue. It was a human issue. This was evident in King’s passionate concern about a wide range of concerns: “The revolution for human rights is opening up unhealthy areas in American life and permitting a new and wholesome healing to take place,” King once told a racially mixed audience in 1967 during his “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” speech. “Eventually, the civil rights movement will have contributed infinitely more to the nation than eradicating racial injustice.”

Moral leadership played a profound role in King’s justice work. He argued that authentic moral leadership must involve itself in the situations of all who are damned, disinherited, disrespected, and dispossessed, and moral leadership must be part of a participatory government that is feverishly working to dismantle the existing discriminatory laws that truncate full participation in the fight to advance democracy.

However, if King were among us today, he would say that it is not enough to look outside ourselves to see the places where society is broken. It is not enough to talk about institutions and workplaces that fracture and separate people based on race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation, among other issues. Often, we find that these institutions and workplaces are broken, dysfunctional, and wounded in the same ways we are. The structures we have created mirror not who we want to be but who we are.

King would remind us that we cannot heal the world without healing ourselves. In light of King’s teachings, healing ourselves is the greatest task and the most difficult work we must do. This work must be done in relation to our justice work in the world.

In “A Farewell to Arms,” Ernest Hemingway said that the world breaks us all, but some of us grow strong in those broken places. King’s teachings invite us to grow strong in our broken places - not only to mend the unhealthy world we live in but also the unhealthy world we carry around within us.

“If you want to see love, be love. If you want to receive compassion, be compassionate. If you want respect, you have to show respect,” Bernice King said in an interview promoting her 2022 children’s book “It Starts With Me.” Dr. Bernice A. King is the CEO of The King Center and the youngest surviving daughter of MLK. “Stop waiting on the next leader, the next Martin Luther King Jr. It starts with you!”

I know that the struggle against racism that King talked about is only legitimate if I am also fighting anti-Semitism, homophobia, sexism, and classism - not only out in the world but also in myself. Otherwise, I am creating an ongoing cycle of abuse that goes on unexamined and unaccounted for.

We are foolish if we think we can heal the world and not ourselves. And we delude ourselves if we believe that King was only talking about the woundedness of institutional racism and not the personal wounds we all carry as human beings.

Ironically, our culture of woundedness and victimization has bonded us together in brokenness. Sharing wounds to depict and honor our pain has created a new language of intimacy, a bonding ritual some feel more able to trust. When we bond in these unhealthy ways, we miss opportunities to work collaboratively with others to effect change in seemingly small ways that eventually lead to significant outcomes.

When we use our gifts to serve others, as King has taught us, we shift the paradigm of personal brokenness to personal healing. We also shift the paradigm of looking for moral leadership from outside of ourselves to within ourselves, thus realizing we are not only the agents of change in society but also the moral leaders we have been looking for.

Therefore, our job keeping King’s dream alive is to remember that our longing for social justice is also inextricably tied to our longing for personal healing. And it starts with you.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board

member and Columnist, The Reverend

Irene Monroe is an ordained minister,

motivational speaker and she speaks for

a sector of society that is frequently

invisible. Rev. Monroe does a weekly

Monday segment, “All Revved Up!” on

WGBH (89.7 FM), on Boston Public Radio

and a weekly Friday segment “The Take”

on New England Channel NEWS (NECN).

She’s a Huffington Post blogger and a

syndicated religion columnist. Her

columns appear in cities across the

country and in the U.K, and Canada. Also

she writes a column in the Boston home

LGBTQ newspaper Baywindows and

Cambridge Chronicle. A native of

Brooklyn, NY, Rev. Monroe graduated

from Wellesley College and Union

Theological Seminary at Columbia

University, and served as a pastor at an

African-American church in New Jersey

before coming to Harvard Divinity School

to do her doctorate. She has received the

Harvard University Certificate of

Distinction in Teaching several times

while being the head teaching fellow of

the Rev. Peter Gomes, the Pusey Minister

in the Memorial Church at Harvard who is

the author of the best seller, THE GOOD

BOOK. She appears in the film For the

Bible Tells Me So and was profiled in the

Gay Pride episode of In the Life, an

Emmy-nominated segment. Monroe’s

coming out story is profiled in “CRISIS:

40 Stories Revealing the Personal, Social,

and Religious Pain and Trauma of

Growing up Gay in America" and in

"Youth in Crisis." In 1997 Boston

Magazine cited her as one of Boston's 50

Most Intriguing Women, and was profiled

twice in the Boston Globe, In the Living

Arts and The Spiritual Life sections for

her LGBT activism. Her papers are at the

Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College's

research library on the history of women

in America. Her website is

irenemonroe.com. Contact the Rev.

Monroe and BC.