Hey, everyone, you're listening to Code Switch from NPR.

I'm B.A. Parker.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day is just around the corner,

and Dr. King is a figure whose legacy we think about a lot around this time of year.

Something is happening in our world.

The masses of people are rising up,

and wherever they are assembled today, whether they are

in Johannesburg, South Africa, Nairobi, Kenya, or Cray, Ghana, New York City, Atlanta,

Georgia, Jackson, Mississippi,

are Memphis, Tennessee. The cry is always the same. We want to be free.

But this year, it seems like certain parts of the country are thinking about Dr. King's legacy a little differently. You might have heard by now that the Trump administration recently removed MLK

Day, along with Juneteenth, as a free entry day at National Parks. And we talked just a few

weeks ago on the show about how this past year, Dr. King's image started showing up pretty regularly

in some very racist videos that users generated using AI.

That was before, the King estate requested that his image stopped being used on OpenAI's

Abseora.

And then, just a few days ago, it was announced that the MLK Day concert that's held annually

at the Kennedy Center would be moved to D.C.'s Howard Theater instead.

So it feels like this year is probably more important than ever to think about who Dr. King

was, what he represented, and what we can still learn from him about who we are as a country.

He's somebody who forces us to grapple with big moral questions about how we ought to live together.

He really forces us to confront questions that are central to our political lives.

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