In the early months of 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. did something he rarely allowed himself to do — he stepped away. He and his wife Coretta, along with Bernard Lee and Dora McDonald, retreated to the hills of Ocho Rios, Jamaica. No phone. No press. No urgent knocks at the door. For the first time in years, King was alone with his thoughts, unburdened by the constant demands of speeches, marches and negotiations.
This was not leisure; it was preparation. King’s final book —“Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?”— would be a map for a country at war with its conscience. He understood the weight of the moment, of the Movement. For a month, he was not the leader — only the writer. He labored over the words, threading together the questions that would haunt a nation long after he was gone.
And then the summer came, and America burned.
Across the country, cities erupted — Newark, Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis. A total of 158 uprisings were alternately labeled riots, rebellions, unrest and disorder. King saw it coming. Three months before the unrest in Newark and Detroit, he stood at Stanford University and warned of the fire ahead. “All of our cities are potentially powder kegs,” he said in his speech, “The Other America.” But he was careful to add, “I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air.” They are born from something deeper — something raw, unresolved. They come from the slums and the segregated schools, from a people whose labor built the country but whose lives are seen as disposable. “All of these things,” King said, “have brought about a great deal of despair and a great deal of desperation, a great deal of disappointment and even bitterness in the Negro communities.”
Fifty-eight years later, another January arrived, and Donald Trump was sworn into office on the same day reserved to honor King’s legacy. The symbolism was unmistakable, accompanied by a campaign — not a whisper but a roar — that was a full-throated promise to roll back the gains for which King and his contemporaries had fought.
Almost immediately, the Trump administration moved with purpose. The moves to change were not new but familiar — echoes of a past America clawing its way back. Policies dismantled, protections erased, the undoing of what had barely been built. One of the first targets of the administration was an order first signed by former President Lyndon Johnson on September 24, 1965. ICE followed suit, sweeping through neighborhoods of “Blue Cities.” Diversity initiatives? Branded as reverse racism. Black progress? Frozen in time. Make America Great Again was never a promise — it was a return, a rolling back, a demand that the country abandon even the pretense of justice for all.
And none of this was improvisation. It was a blueprint.
It was recently reported that nearly two-thirds of Trump’s executive orders were derived from Project 2025. At its core, Project 2025 is a restoration plan—the restoration of unchecked rule, of government unburdened by equity, of an America where justice is as exclusive as country club memberships. This is America as it has always been, slipping out of the costume of progress, returning to its natural state. It is the same America that met Reconstruction with lynch mobs, that answered desegregation with violence, that watched the fire in 1967 and chose jails over justice. It is the same America that in 2020 watched George Floyd beg for breath beneath the knee of the state, listened as he called for his mother and felt nothing but impatience. Temporary shame. Transactional reckoning. And the unshaken certainty that, given enough time, the story could be rewritten, that the knee was not really on his neck, that he was not really murdered, that the problem was not the violence but those who dared to protest it.
In 1967, King posed a question: Where do we go from here? Chaos or community?
For decades, America has answered with evasion, with mythmaking, with the desperate hope that history will forget what it refuses to reconcile. We have seen Black power diluted into spectacle, reduced to representation without redistribution, presence without authority, visibility without justice. We have watched the illusion hold, for a time — watched as the symbols of progress were mistaken for its substance, as the election of a Black president was treated not as a milestone but as an endpoint.
And when the illusion falters — when the mask of racial progress slips — America slips back into an all too familiar pattern. Its fears are stoked. It panics. It criminalizes. It turns back the clock.
King warned us of what would happen if America failed to choose community. And now, standing at the edge of a second Trump presidency, we are faced with that choice again — not in rhetoric, not in hollow remembrance, but in real terms.
America chooses in policy, and in power, who is allowed to dream. America chooses in what it permits and punishes, in what it remembers and erases. We see now that it does not choose solemn reflections on King’s words. It does not choose tributes or commemorative coins in carefully curated Black History Month programming.
So what do we need? We need places where democracy is not just debated but lived, where people gather not as strangers but as neighbors, bound by something deeper than transaction. We need block parties where the music spills out onto the pavement, where elders sit in lawn chairs swapping stories while kids weave between folding tables stacked with aluminum trays of delicious home cooking. We need community barbecues where the grill smoke rises like an offering, where people who don’t talk politics still talk about the neighborhood, about whose kid just got into college, about which street needs fixing, about the things that hold us together even when the world tries to pull us apart.
We need bowling leagues and BAMS FESTS, church basements and Christmas Markets, easter egg hunts and Embrace Ideas Festivals, Rotary Clubs and RoxFilms, barbershops, and Boston While Blacks — spaces where democracy is not a spectacle but a habit, a thing practiced in the ordinary, in the casual, in the slow, steady work of belonging to each other. We need an investment in social infrastructure, not just in roads and bridges but in the human architecture that holds a nation together.
Democracy is not self-sustaining. It requires tending, regular maintenance and a place to be practiced beyond the ballot box. It requires calm, patience, a steady hand and clear-eyed optimism. And above all, we need what we have always needed —community. Not as nostalgia, not as metaphor, but as foundation, as the only real answer to the question of who we are and who we might still become. Choose community, choose democracy.