Bernice A. King, the youngest daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., has called out Rev. Lorenzo Sewell, the pastor who delivered President Donald Trump’s inaugural prayer, and others who she says publicly misuse her dad’s famous speech.
On Wednesday, King shared a video clip on X, formerly Twitter, capturing moments from Sewell’s prayer. Sewell referenced the late civil rights leader’s “I Have a Dream” speech during the inaugural event, which fell on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a federal holiday.
King argued that people have weakened the message behind the speech, which called for the end of racism as well as economic inequality, among other things.
“I don’t deny the power of my father’s most well-known speech, ‘I Have a Dream,’” she wrote. “However, its power and popularity (with focus on its conclusion) have been misused to weaken its clear messaging about ending racism, stopping police brutality, ensuring voting rights, and eradicating economic injustice.”
She then directly called out Sewell, asking why the pastor didn’t “pray these parts of the Dream during President Trump’s Inauguration.”
She continued, “The inconvenient truth (that disallows embracing the pipe dream that racism no longer exists in this country) is that Project 2025 and some of the plans that his voters encouraged POTUS to roll out on day one are reflective of an ‘America’ that denies the comprehensive King.”
Sewell, who spoke at the Republican National Convention in July and who hosted Trump at his Detroit church in June, made several references to the 1963 speech during his prayer.
At one point, he expressed his gratitude to God for calling Trump “for such a time as this — that America would begin to dream again.”
“We pray that you use our president — that we will live in a nation where we will not be judged by the color of our skin, but by the content of our character,” he said during the prayer, borrowing a famous line from the speech.
Trump also invoked Martin Luther King Jr. in his inaugural address. Like many other prominent conservatives, the president sought to connect the civil rights leader’s fight against social injustices to the idea of promoting racial “colorblindness,” which refers to the idea that race can and should be ignored and should have no influence on how people are treated in society.
“We will strive together to make his dream a reality,” Trump said about the late King at one point. And when he later broached the topic of race, he said: “We will forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based.”
His “merit-based” remark was a callout to the ongoing crusade led by conservatives — and now helped by his new executive actions — against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
People often use the following line from the late civil rights leader’s speech to promotecolorblindness:
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
But King has long rejected any suggestions that her father’s speeches or work demonstrate that he would support the idea of racial colorblindness, or that he’d oppose affirmative action or DEI practices today.
“People using ‘not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character’ to deter discussion of, teaching about, and protest against racism are not students of the comprehensive #MLK,” she wrote on X in 2023.
She added, “My father’s dream and work included eradicating racism, not ignoring it.”
And on Wednesday, King urged everyone on X to get her “Daddy’s Dream right.”
She invited those quoting her father to also refer to some of his other works, such as “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which she said is harder to “distort.”
“Don’t pray the Dream in pursuit of false peace, which cries for unity while decrying inclusive and equitable policies and practices,” she wrote.
Many historians, professors and experts on race and race relations in the U.S. have similarly called out attempts to connect Martin Luther King Jr.’s fight for justice and equality to the idea of colorblindness.
Read on to hear what experts have to say about the “I Have a Dream” speech, and what Martin Luther King Jr.’s work really tells us:
People repeatedly misuse Martin Luther King Jr.’s ’I Have a Dream” speech.
Lerone A. Martin, Professor of Religious Studies and of African and African American Studies at Stanford University, told CNN last year that the “I Have a Dream” speech has been repeatedly misinterpreted to mean a call for “the dismantling of various mechanisms that were intended to bring about a more equitable society.”
Martin, who is the director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, said that the entirety of Martin Luther King Jr.’s work — including his 1967 book, “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community,” in which he assesses the next phase of the movement for social justice — proves that he did not promote colorblindness.
Instead, the heart of the “I Have a Dream” speech is about “love, reparative justice and equity,” said Marcus Anthony Hunter, author and professor of Sociology & African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Trump’s push for colorblindness in his inaugural address — and on MLK Day — missed the mark.
Shaun Harper, a professor of Education, Business, and Public Policy at the University of Southern California, said that anyone who thinks the late activist would be in favor of dismantling DEI initiatives that “aim to right America’s historical and present-day wrongs against people of color, women, and poor Americans” don’t understand who Martin Luther King Jr. was and “what he actually fought and died for.”
He told HuffPost that he believes the late King would be “repulsed” by people taking his “I Have a Dream” speech out of context.
“Surely, he didn’t mean for those words to be misused to deny Black people race-salient, well-deserved, long-overdue remedies to centuries of racial violence, discrimination, and harm against us in this country,” he said.
Hunter added: “Throughout his life and work, Dr. King held an unshakeable commitment to repairing the breaches in our society, such as the legacies of enslavement and war, alongside systemic equity.”
Henry-Louis Taylor Jr., professor of Urban and Regional Planning at University at Buffalo, said that Martin Luther King Jr. clearly pointed out in his 1963 speech that Black people in the U.S. were still “not free,” 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed.
“He wanted the country to know, and the leadership to know, that Black people had come to the capital to remind America that there would be neither rest nor tranquility until they were free,” he told HuffPost.
He added that the civil rights leader’s words were meant as a pledge that “Black people would never turn back — that they could not turn back … until freedom rings from every mountainside.”
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Taylor Jr. called Sewell’s prayer at the inauguration “blasphemous.”
Hunter advised those who think the “I Have a Dream” speech promoted colorblindness to “read the speech again.”
“Reading is fundamental,” he said.