The coincidence that Martin Luther King Jr. Day lands on the same Monday as Donald Trump’s inauguration isn’t a cause for concern, according to Bernice King, the late civil rights icon’s daughter.
In an interview with MSNBC’s “The Weekend” on Saturday, she said the timing provides an opportunity to reflect on her father’s legacy as the U.S. transitions to a new administration.
“It’s wonderful that this occurs on the King holiday, the inauguration, because it reminds us of King,” said Bernice King, the youngest of Martin Luther King’s four children and who was 5 years old when her father was assassinated in 1968. “It points us back to King. It says, ‘When we move forward, we’ve got to do it in the spirit of King.’”
An overlap between the federal holiday — established in 1983 and first observed in 1986 — and Inauguration Day has occurred only two other times. The first was during President Bill Clinton’s swearing-in in 1997, and the second was during Barack Obama’s in 2013. Obama also took his oath of office using a Bible that had belonged to King himself.
Bernice King, who has been critical of Trump in the past for his divisive rhetoric, addressed those who feel “defeated” amid the looming inauguration, calling on Americans to “stay focused on the goal” of nonviolence, a value championed by her father.
“We have to strategize. We’ve been missing the strategy. We’ve been missing the spirit of Dr. King,” Bernice King said. “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-centered way of thinking, speaking, acting and engaging that leads to personal, cultural and societal transformation.”
Martin Luther King III, King’s eldest son, also addressed the timing, urging Trump to “be in dialogue with everybody,” not just his supporters.
“If you said you wanted to be a uniter, then those who didn’t support you, you need to reach out to them or allow them to reach out to you,” the younger King said on “Meet the Press” Sunday. “We’re not reflective of the ‘United’ States of America right this moment, in my judgment.”
The King family has long been outspoken in its criticism of Trump. In August, Trump compared the crowd at his “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021 — before his supporters stormed the Capitol — to the 1963 March on Washington, where King delivered his legendary “I Have A Dream” speech from the Lincoln Memorial.
“If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours, same real estate, same everything, same number of people,” he said during a news conference at Mar-a-Lago.
Although Trump acknowledged official estimates recorded a smaller crowd size at his rally compared to the March on Washington, he said, “You look at it, and you look at the picture of my crowd … we actually had more people.”
Bernice King bluntly rebutted the comment, calling it “absolutely not true.”
“I really wish that people would stop using my father to support fallacy,” she wrote on X at the time.
Trump’s crowd was around 53,000 people, according to the congressional Jan. 6 committee. That’s about one-fifth of the 250,000 who were estimated to be at King’s 1963 address.
During Martin Luther King Day celebrations in 2018, the civil rights leader’s children condemned then-President Trump, particularly the disparaging comments he made about African countries during a meeting with senators on immigration.
“When a president insists that our nation needs more citizens from white states like Norway, I don’t even think we need to spend any time even talking about what it says and what it is,” Martin Luther King III said at the time. “We got to find a way to work on this man’s heart.”
