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- Nonviolent disobedience: Emphasize de-escalation and avoid "combat force with force" to maintain moral authority and public support.
- Training and strategy: Re-engage in freedom schools and learn historical tactics like direct action and organized nonviolent resistance.
- Clarity of purpose: Be explicit about goals, resist despair, and sustain activism with disciplined, principled commitment.
Protests against the Trump administration’s domestic policies reached a fever-pitch in recent weeks following the deadly ICE shooting of Renee Good. Protesters have described being violently assaulted by federal law enforcement officers, including the use of chemical weapons, while President Donald Trump has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 to send the military to the U.S. streets.
The images of U.S. citizens being tear-gassed and violently arrested as they demonstrate their First Amendment rights are eerily familiar to the Civil Rights era, when demonstrations and protests for civil rights and voting enfranchisement led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were met with similar violence.
“This kind of engagement always existed. And yet people still continued during my dad’s…and my mom’s era. It’s not like this conduct is new. It’s tragic that, as opposed to learning how to de-accelerate, the military concept is to accelerate,” Martin Luther King III, Dr. King’s oldest son, told theGrio. “You go back to 1965 when John Lewis and Hosea Williams marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they were beaten. So this is not new. It’s just that we as a society haven’t learned that history, in a sense, kind of repeats itself.”
MLK III, who is the chairman of the Drum Major Institute, rebuked the recent escalations by ICE and Homeland Security Investigations officers, who have surged into Minneapolis by the thousands and have also been sent to cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston.
“It’s like unconscionable what we see now,” said King. “We have to keep demanding that military entities work on a de-escalation. ICE has an unlimited budget. It’s bigger than the FBI now.”
The Pentagon reportedly has 1,500 National Guard troops on standby to be deployed in Minneapolis should Trump utilize the Insurrection Act, which was invoked several times during the Civil Rights era to enforce desegregation laws in the South. What’s different about the use of federal law enforcement and threat of military action, says King, is that it’s being “utilized universally in our streets.”
“It wasn’t always in our streets. It was just in communities that were demonstrating for freedom and justice and equality,” he told theGrio.
No matter the righteous outrage, MLK III urged protesters today not to “combat force with force,” a stance that would contradict his father’s movement of nonviolent disobedience. “It will create something else, and that’s a dangerous path,” he said.
However, the civil rights leader said the federal government had already put the country on a dangerous path. While King acknowledges that the U.S. has an “immigration problem,” he said that the government’s tactic to address it is creating “more chaos, not community.”
King’s wife, Arndrea Waters King, who is president of the Drum Major Institute, said in this political and social climate of protests and government upheaval, it’s important to remember that “direct action” was one of several strategies used by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his peers of the Civil Rights movement.
Waters King told theGrio American protesters today should be “well-versed in all of the strategies that were used by the civil rights community,” and most importantly, trained. For example, Rosa Parks, she noted, attended the Highlander Folk School, later renamed the Highlander Research and Education Center, in Tennessee, where the civil rights icon attended a desegregation workshop in 1955, weeks before she famously refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Parks’ nonviolent resistance led to the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott.
“Perhaps it’s time to re-engage in freedom schools so that activists and people are trained in how to be impactful in direct action. And also being a student of history to also remember that we can’t let despair get into us,” said Mrs. King. “Gandhi talked about the fact that when he despaired, that he was reminded that throughout history, that the way of tyranny, the way murderers never prevailed, that they sometimes seemed invincible, but in the end that they always failed.”
The Kings applauded today’s protesters against the Trump administration’s domestic policies, which are disproportionately impacting Black and Brown communities. In the year since Trump returned to White House, there has been a 133% increase in demonstrations since his first term, most notably the mass “No Kings” protests that kicked off in June 2025, in which millions have taken to the streets.
“It’s very important for us as we’re standing to be very clear of what we’re standing for,” said Waters King. She said that even though “these are very heavy times for all of us,” it’s imperative that pro-equality Americans not “let despair get inside of us” but instead “find that inner fire in some way, and that inner source to fuel ourselves to be engaged and to be active.”
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