Welcome to the beat, everyone. I'm Ari Melburgh, and on this Monday, many are marking today's holiday, which honors Dr. Martin Luther King.

You can see the wreath laying at the King Monument at the National Mall, gatherings in places from Colorado to Texas, and President Biden, making it clear that he does not see today or our work as only about commemorating some past history,

but a test for right now, a test for all of us, for how America faces the rising hate.

And today's problems, not just yesterday's, and how we deal with what we know

is the original sin of racism and racial strife, all of it supersized in some ways for this

MAGA era.

We face another inflection point in our nation's history.

One that's going to determine what this country

looks like several decades from now. Will we choose democracy over autocracy or community over

chaos, love or hate? These are the questions of our time. And that Dr. King's life and legacy,

in my view, show us the way forward.

Biden speaking at an event hosted by Reverend Sharpton, the civil rights leader and our MSNBC colleague,

which came after Biden was the first sitting president ever to deliver the Sunday sermon at Dr. King's Atlanta Church.

And that, of course, has been a place that if you follow

the news and politics, you may know it's been back in the news because of its current role,

the church led by Reverend Raphael Warnock, now the twice-elected United States Senator and

first-ever black senator from Georgia. So plenty of symbolism hanging over that appearance

yesterday.

Warnock's election is relevant today in other ways. It's the kind of electoral breakthrough that Dr. King was fighting for. It's one that many civil rights leaders also say came far, far too

late. In America, if we are going to speak directly and plainly, it is sometimes the case that

the South, I should say, the South is treated as a kind of time machine, where breakthroughs that

America has experienced in other places decades past are now celebrated, however tardily, for current times. So we hear about a

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