by The Reverend Dr. Debora Jackson, Member, Board of Directors, A Faith That Does Justice

Every year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we tell a familiar story. We replay the 1963 March on Washington, quote the hopeful lines of “I Have a Dream,” and reassure ourselves that America has made progress. The ritual is comforting. It is also incomplete.

Dr. King was not merely a dreamer; he was a diagnostician. He named injustice with precision, urgency, and moral clarity. And if we listen honestly, his diagnosis still applies: America’s problem has never been Black people, immigrants, or any other marginalized group. America’s enduring problem is injustice itself.

The prophet Micah framed it plainly centuries ago: “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?” King built his leadership on this mandate. He understood that injustice does not disappear—it adapts. It changes its language, its targets, and its justifications. But its logic remains the same.

In 1908, sociologist Charlotte Perkins Gilman published an essay titled “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem.” Her conclusion was blunt: “He is here; we can’t get rid of him; it is all our fault; he does not suit us as he is.” Black Americans, forcibly brought to this country and then abandoned after emancipation, were recast as a social burden. Gilman’s proposed solution was not liberation but control—graded citizenship, compulsory labor, and productivity as the measure of worth.

It is easy to dismiss this as an artifact of another era. It would also be dishonest.

Today, the “Negro Problem” has been rebranded as the “Immigrant Problem.” The language has changed; the logic has not. “They are here and we can’t get rid of them.” “They do not suit us as they are.” “They must earn their place.” These assumptions now shape immigration enforcement, detention regimes, and deportation policies that disproportionately target Black and brown communities.

Racial profiling, aggressive ICE operations, mass deportations, and the termination of Temporary Protected Status for people fleeing violence and instability all reveal a system more interested in managing people than protecting them. Labor is welcomed; liberty is conditional. Productivity is prized; dignity is negotiable.

King rejected this logic unequivocally. In Letter from Birmingham Jail, he warned against a society that prefers “order” over justice and “negative peace” over real transformation. In Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break the Silence, he condemned economic and political systems that value profit, property, and power more than human lives. He named racism, extreme materialism, and militarism as “giant triplets” that must be confronted together.

What King demanded then is what Micah still requires now.

To do justice, we must tell the truth without evasion. The United States has repeatedly reframed moral failure as someone else’s deficiency. We move from blaming enslaved Africans to blaming immigrants, from segregation to surveillance, from exclusion by law to exclusion by policy. Progress that refuses honesty is not progress at all.

To love mercy, we must reject systems that control rather than liberate. Mercy is not detention under the guise of protection, exploitation disguised as opportunity, or surveillance sold as security. Mercy insists that people are not problems to be managed but neighbors to be safeguarded.

And to walk humbly, we must accept collective responsibility. Injustice is not merely historical; it is inherited. Neutrality only preserves the status quo. As King reminded us, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” We are bound together in what he called an “inescapable network of mutuality.” What happens to the marginalized—here or abroad—implicates us all.

The temptation every MLK Day is to honor King without following him; to quote him without standing where he stood. But King’s relevance endures precisely because the root problem remains unresolved. He believed deeply in God, in justice, and in the possibility that America could become what it professes to be.

If we are serious about honoring his legacy, we must move beyond celebration toward transformation. Doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly are not poetic ideals—they are moral demands. And until we answer them, America’s injustice problem will continue to shape our future.

The Reverend Dr. Debora Jackson is an experienced senior leader in both nonprofit and for-profit organizations. She is a member of the Board of Directors at A Faith That Does Justice.