Only once before since it became a federal holiday has Martin Luther King Jr. Day fallen on the same day as a presidential inauguration. That was in 1997, when Bill Clinton took the oath of office for his second term as the 42nd president of the United States.
Martin Luther King III, the late civil rights leader’s son and a longtime activist himself, spoke with CBS News the morning of President-elect Donald Trump’s second inauguration, touching on how the nation continues to move forward despite political disagreements.
“We’ve elected President Trump again, and the question is how do we navigate in civility, because historically there hasn’t been civility,” he said. “Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King went against what society attempting to do initially and helped create the climate so we could move forward in a constructive way.”
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Like when his father was alive, King said there needs to be continued dialogue among Americans about the direction the nation’s future should take.
“A direction that is in the interest of all Americans and not one particular group,” he said. “I just think civility has been temporarily lost and I would like to see civility to be brought back to the political discourse.”
King said the wealth inequality his father was fighting against before he was assassinated in 1968 is still a struggle in America today.
“Progress has been made, but how do we increase that? How do we address the issues of economic inequality?” he asked, noting that his father was advocating for a “radical distribution of wealth.”
“Unfortunately, that is still needed today — a redistribution of some wealth, because there is such a huge disparity,” he said. “We’ve got to change the climate.”
