Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day coinciding with the inauguration of incoming US President Donald Trump sparked a reaction from his daughter Bernice King.
According to NBC News, after it was announced that Trump inauguration would take place on Monday, January 20, 2025, people quickly noticed that the swearing-in ceremony and MLK Day were occurring together.
Netizens showed a mixed reaction to this alignment while Luther King’s daughter found it “wonderful.”
The youngest daughter of the American Baptist minister, in an interview with MSNBC’s The Weekend, expressed, “It’s wonderful that this occurs on the King holiday, the inauguration, because it reminds us of King. It points us back to King. It says, ‘When we move forward, we’ve got to do it in the spirit of King.’”
“We have to strategise. We’ve been missing the strategy. We’ve been missing the spirit of Dr. King. The spirit of Dr. King is nonviolence. And nonviolence is not just a posture, it’s a mindset. For us, we define it as a love-centred way of thinking, speaking, acting, and engaging that leads to personal, cultural, and societal transformation,” she urged.
Moreover, this is not the first time that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day overlapped with Inauguration Day. Previously, the federal holiday coincided with a ceremony during President Bill Clinton’s swearing-in in 1997 and a second time during Barack Obama’s in 2013.
