Elizabeth Hyman, Staff Writer  

Image credit: AFP via Getty Images 

As we sit here in a new year, an election year, we are more divided than ever. We face a world that knows not the horror it brings to its youth. MLK Day was just over a week ago, but now, more than ever, we need to be reminded of his message. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a man of the people, and we should remember him as such. His teachings arose from that position and demonstrated his consistent focus on the people of this nation.  

People have the power and the agency to create change, make progress, and, as we’ve seen with our own eyes, even the unfortunate power to regress. Dr. King envisioned a world where all people are viewed as equal, where what matters most is the content of character. As I sit here writing this in 2024, I think of 1964, when Dr. King received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts toward racial justice. He immediately announced that he would donate the prize money (all $54,123 of it) to further the pursuit of civil rights. As we all well know, Dr. King was assassinated in the spring of 1968, only four years after he won the award. This atrocity set the world on fire, and rightfully so, because small-mindedness and hate had toppled a pillar of hope.  

Now, we again look to Dr. King to learn the same lesson we have yet to grasp: all people, every one of us, are fellow human beings. In a time when we stare down the barrel of America’s most crucial election cycle, I wonder what Dr. King would have to say about all this. Would he be ashamed of us? Wouldn’t he remind us that his message and dream extended across race, religion, identity, and country? Have we, as a nation, failed him? Sixty years after Dr. King won his Nobel Prize, we stand, wondering how ignorant we have remained. The hero has left us, true, but how dare we abandon our sense of community and justice in his absence? Here, six decades later, we must do better.