This speech was presented by Darren Walker on October 27, 2025 at Harvard University as part of their annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Lecture.

Thank you for the invitation, the introduction, and the warm welcome to Harvard—and to the Memorial Church of Harvard University. 

I’m honored to join you in conversation. I’m humbled to serve as the fourth annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. commemorative lecturer, humbled to follow in the footsteps of three extraordinary trailblazers—revered, beloved colleagues, all: The venerable Sherrilyn Ifill; the honorable Attorney General Loretta Lynch; the admirable Dr. Freeman A. Hrabowski.

I thank you, Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin, for facilitating our discussion in a moment. I have been looking forward to this evening.  

And I feel profoundly moved, overwhelmed with awe, to reflect on my moment at this podium—my moment at a pulpit where Dr. King preached—and to imagine what he might have observed. To see in your faces, the faces of previous generations. To see in our democracy on the brink, their democracy on the brink. 

A few years ago, when President Bacow established this esteemed lecture series, he invoked Dr. King’s visit to Harvard Law School in October, 1962—almost exactly 63 years ago. 

And appropriately so. We should find pride, and draw inspiration from the fact that—before the boycotts and bombings in Birmingham; before the March on Washington, or Freedom Summer, or Bloody Sunday; before the man became myth and then marble—Dr. King, a young pastor from Atlanta, came to Harvard.

This evening, however, I invite you to reflect on Dr. King at a different moment—on the eve of 1968, the final year of his life. This was Dr. King in the valley, not King on the mountaintop. This was a man who had grown weary from shouldering a heavy burden. This was a man who had grown wiser, too—more attuned to what he called “the three major evils”: Racism, militarism, and poverty.

And so, Dr. King, alongside his colleagues, courageously organized and mobilized a new campaign—because he recognized that inequality was a grave threat to democracy. He called it the Poor People’s Campaign—and through the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Ford Foundation was proud to support it. 

What Dr. King said then, in December 1967, was the following: “America is at a crossroads of history.” Together, “as a nation and a society,” we must “choose a new path and move upon it with resolution and courage.” We must “work creatively” against “despair and indifference.” 

Today, America, once again, is at “a crossroads of history.” America, once again, must “choose a new path and move upon it with resolution and courage.” America, once again, must “work creatively against despair… and against indifference.”

As I see it, we are starting into a hard set of choices. These are choices about what kind of nation we are and will be. About what kind of leaders we will be. About what kind of citizens we will be. 

Dean Brown-Nagin is an esteemed scholar of one of our shared heroes: the remarkable Constance Baker Motley—pathbreaking lawyer, the first Black woman to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court, the “Civil Rights Queen.” And Constance Baker Motley once observed: “Something which we think is impossible now is not impossible in another decade.” Motley meant this in the affirmative—as a challenge to our moral imaginations. But during this last decade—tragically, painfully—we have learned that this is just as true in the negative.  

When the Ford Foundation’s Board of Trustees elected me to the position from which I take my leave this week, I could not have imagined that, in my lifetime, this country—our country—would nurture strains of populism and illiberalism that seemed only to take root in other places. I thought it too anathema to our best traditions and aspirations. I thought it wholly inconsistent with our civic convictions and our civic creed. And yet, as one can plainly see, the United States is not immune. To the contrary. Our pluralist democracy is dangerously out of balance—in grave, existential peril. 

How did we get here?  

We got here because of the inequality about which Dr. King cautioned all those years ago. We got here because inequality fuels a vicious cycle that produces anxiety, and resentment, and grievance.  

The fact is, through the decades, America’s mobility escalator has slowed and halted for many. As a result, a pernicious form of distrust and hopelessness has entrenched itself among people of all communities. Among people of all races and regions—in red states and blue ones. 

This is the crisis of our time—the crisis long simmering beneath the surface. Because hope? Hope is the oxygen of democracy, but inequality suffocates democracy.  

Langston Hughes asked, “What happens to a dream deferred?” Well, we are seeing—in real time—what happens to the American dream betrayed. We are seeing the explosion. We, collectively, have lost grip of the shared identity that binds us together as Americans. We are turning against each other when we should be turning toward one another; when we should be finding common cause, and common ground, and a common good. 

Indeed, we have accepted, normalized, the opposite: A suffocating toxicity. Contempt, hatred, malice, mendacity. A culture of outright nihilism.

Custom dictates that when a leader offers a farewell—as I do with a heart full of gratitude this week—they offer a word of warning. So, with thanks for indulging me, here is mine. 

A half century ago, James Baldwin cautioned that the most ferocious enemy of justice is power allied with ignorance. Today, I would posit an emerging corollary as well: The most ferocious enemy of democracy is impunity allied with indifference.

Simply put, we have become indifferent to rank injustice of every kind. We have become indifferent to corruption. Indifferent to cruelty. Indifferent to moral decay. And to invoke the wisdom of the valiant Elie Wiesel: Indifference always “benefits the aggressor, never the victim.” Indifference always benefits the strong… at the expense of the weak. Indifference always benefits the powerful at the expense of dignity, and equality, and justice.

Now, this is not to minimize the shock, and fear, and grief of this moment. The shock is acute. The fear is well founded. The grief is pervasive—and I grieve, too, for all we have lost. And yet, we have not lost everything—not yet.  

At this defining crossroads, we can still choose—as Dr. King said—“resolution and courage” over “despair.” We can still choose moral leadership and active, engaged citizenship. We can still choose to reject the indifference. To shake off the stupor. To lean in, not hunker down.

And, yes, to rediscover and recommit to our shared American identity: The idea of America. 

The idea of America: These four words have been the most powerful, but also the most tested—and contested—in our history. To me, the meaning is simple, but profound. 

From many, we are one—e pluribus unum—united by our shared values and our shared story. The radical ideas, the noble aspirations, enshrined in Thomas Jefferson’s declaration, 250 years on. And the righteous actions of our ancestors and elders—of Dr. King, Constance Baker Motley, and countless others—to give them life and meaning for all. 

We all are created equal. We all are endowed with inalienable rights. Happiness is a pursuit, not an achievement—realized through self-determination, but also tolerance, generosity and reason. Who we are… This emerges not from “blood and soil,” but from fidelity to these truths we hold self-evident even still. 

To be sure, some might dismiss this inheritance as fruit from a poisoned tree. “Hollow words, at best,” they say. And there is no arguing the facts. 

America has functioned as a democracy for less than one human lifetime—and as an imperfect democracy at that. When you think about it, our democracy is only as old as I am.

I was born in 1959, into a nation riven by American apartheid. When I was a child, the adults in my life could not vote in our Louisiana and Texas towns. I was six years old when President Lyndon Johnson enacted legislation to guarantee the franchise. And even these protections are hollowed out by the day—as are so many of our fundamental rights.

And yet, for my part, I believe that our American compass is still true. My love of America is unwavering, unyielding, unfaltering. In our founders and their legacy, I see genius. And to me, our founders’ contradictions are less remarkable than what they set in motion. 

They initiated a grand, complicated experiment in self-government. It led to abolition, and suffrage, and workers’ rights, and civil rights, and women’s rights, and LGBT rights, and disability rights—however slowly, however unevenly.

This is our birthright. The story of a small circle of property-owning men inside Philadelphia’s Independence Hall that, generation by generation, continues to grow wider—precisely because of the patriotic struggle and sacrifice of the people who were once excluded.  

You see, what makes America great—what has always made America great—is not the fact of our perfection, but our act of becoming more perfect. 

What makes the American people exceptional is that we have the strength to acknowledge our failings—moral, structural, personal—and the courage to make wrong into right.

Scripture teaches, rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation. 

What makes me hopeful for America—even amidst tribulation—is the wisdom of the late John Lewis, protégé of Dr. King.  

He said (and I quote): “Ours is not the struggle of one day, one week, or one year. Ours is not the struggle of one judicial appointment or presidential term. Ours is the struggle of a lifetime—or maybe even many lifetimes—and each one of us in every generation must do our part.”

Harvard community: We are made for this moment. We will meet this moment—rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation. We shall overcome this moment, as we have others before. 

This remains my most fervent hope—and it was the hope of Dr. King. During his final days, he penned what he called a “testament of hope.” He observed then (and I quote again): “It is not easy to describe [crises] so profound that [they have] caused the most powerful nation in the world to stagger in confusion and bewilderment.”

I think we can identify.  

These days, one could be forgiven for feeling confusion and bewilderment; for feeling like we’re staggering along, suffering blow after blow. 

But in that reflection, Dr. King also reminded us that human beings have “the capacity to do right as well as wrong.” He reminded us that “history is a path upward, not downward.” And this, he said, “is why I remain an optimist.”

Harvard: Let us give our own testament of hope—our new testament of hope. Let us carry forward the hope of the generations who came before us—and for the generations who will follow. 

No doubt, “America is at a crossroads of history.” But it is still within our power to choose different, to choose better.

Like the poet says, America has never been America to me. But it can be—and it will be—if we “work creatively” against “despair and indifference.”

It can be—and it will be—when, as Dr. King said at Harvard, in 1962: “We emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity—and into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.”

Thank you for this recognition. I will cherish it.