Would MLK support Black Lives Matter?

I believe I would recognize in this movement the same moral fire that animated our struggle — the insistence that Black life carries the full measure of human worth, and that a nation cannot claim to be just while that worth is denied in the streets. The demand that Black lives be valued is not a slogan; it is a restatement of the oldest truth, that every person is made in the image of God. I would stand with that urgency. But I would also speak, as I always did, of method. Our power in Montgomery and Birmingham came not from rage but from discipline — from a love that refused to hate even those who hated us, and from a constructive program that turned protest into policy. I would urge this generation to pair its righteous anger with that same discipline, to build coalitions across lines of race and class, and to keep its eyes on concrete change: in law, in housing, in policing, in wages. Movements are judged not by the heat of a single summer but by the institutions they leave behind. That is the work I would press upon them.