MLK: Moral Arc or Moral Pendulum?

Was Martin Luther King, Jr. right about the "arc of the moral universe?"

Silhouette illustration of MLK licensed via Adobe Stock

You’re going to see a lot of Martin Luther King, Jr. quotes today. People appalled by the Trump regime may reference the “arc of the moral universe” to maintain a semblance of optimism. Those who oppose violent resistance to ICE may argue that “darkness cannot drive out darkness.” But King wasn’t always invoked as an arbiter of morality and justice. In his day, most U.S. citizens disliked him.

MLK’s favorability in the 1960s

In a 1966 Gallup poll, two years before King’s assassination, U.S. citizens were almost twice as likely to have a negative opinion of the civil rights leader (63% to 33%). That same year, Strom Thurmond, an incorrigible racist who railed against the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s (it was Thurmond’s 24-hour filibuster of the 1957 Civil Rights Act that Corey Booker topped last year with his 25-hour speech), won his Senate race that year as a Republican by a wide margin: 62.2% to 37.8%. Granted, it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, since a Senate race isn’t national, but it provides some point of reference for how King’s favorability stacked up against avowed segregationists.

MLK’s favorability in 2023

By contrast, most people today idolize King. According to a Pew Research Center report from 2023, 81% of people in the U.S. said he had a “positive impact” on the U.S., and only 3% believed he had a negative impact, though I wonder how those numbers would shake out today. It would take decades after King’s killing for public opinion of him to become so favorable, though I doubt he cared much about his general popularity.

The moral pendulum

That King’s favorability improved so dramatically may be evidence that the “arc of the moral universe” does indeed “bend toward justice,” but history suggests that there may be a pendulum affixed to that arc. Most periods of progress are followed by racist, violent reactions to that progress.

The Ku Klux Klan formed in the wake of the Civil War and the emancipation of Black people. Jim Crow laws, which enforced racial segregation, were a response to Reconstruction, economic depression and the fear among White people that Black people would take their jobs. Doesn’t that sound familiar? The anti-DEI movement is a modern manifestation of that same fear. Similarly, the increasingly squeezed working classes of the U.S. blame immigrants for taking their jobs—paranoia that is used to rationalize the extrajudicial brutalization of immigrants by ICE, Border Patrol and the DHS.

It’s a dark time in the United States if you’re a noncitizen, seem like you could be a noncitizen (accent and skin color have replaced due process), or don’t support Donald Trump. His regime is targeting blue cities and blue states, terrorizing anyone who dare protest the regime and ICE’s terror tactics. The message is clear: Vote against or speak out against the regime and you will be punished.

The moral arc

Human lives are blips in human history. Our individual points of view are necessarily limited. I’ve seen some bad presidents in my life, but I’ve never seen a U.S. dictator. But dictators aren’t unique. It just feels that way to me. I’ve never experienced one firsthand before. Most people in the U.S. haven’t. Perhaps that’s why so many deny that it’s happening. As long as the regime targets people they disagree with, they will still be able to rationalize what’s going on. But that will change. History guarantees it.

It’s no coincidence that Trump, the vilest, most racist president in modern history, was elected following the second term of the first Black president in U.S. history. Since then, the pendulum has swung in a reactionary direction. Pendulum swings can represent such large portions of our lives that they may convince us that the arc of the moral universe does not exist, that it was a pie-in-the-sky notion peddled by an idealist. But it does exist. It’s just long, as King pointed out—so long that we can’t always see its bend.

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