When President Trump delivered his inauguration speech a year ago today, he thanked the Black community for supporting his 2024 re-election campaign and told them, “I will not forget it.”
Though only 13% of Black voters supported him over Kamala Harris, Trump invoked the Black community’s most luminary figure, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., vowing that in the civil rights leader’s “honor,” his new administration would “strive together to make his dream a reality.”
A year later, Black leaders say Trump’s presidency has been anything but carrying out MLK’s dream, which King described as an “oasis of freedom and justice” in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. In fact, they say Trump’s policies have done the complete opposite, reversing decades of progress for civil rights and voting rights in America.
“Donald Trump and Martin Luther King, Jr. do not have the same vision for this country. They do not have the same vision for the people of this country,” said Jamarr Brown, a Democratic strategist who previously served as executive director of the racial justice organization Color of Change PAC.
He told theGrio, “Dr. King gave his life, quite frankly, in order to ensure that people had civil protections; the right to vote, the right to receive an education, the right to make a fair wage, right to work. And we’ve seen Donald Trump do the exact opposite.”
Brown noted that Trump has worked to reduce funding from public schools and HBCUs, and most notably roll back diversity, equity and inclusion programs that private companies and organizations across the country began to roll it back as a result.
During a two-hour press briefing at the White House marking his first year back in office, Trump touted his diversity rollbacks, despite his agenda leading to Black unemployment skyrocketing to its highest levels since the COVID-19 pandemic and threatening recent record growth for Black businesses and Black wealth.
“We ended the world lunacy and restored common sense, abolished all discriminatory diversity, equity and inclusion, DEI policies, throughout the federal government and the private sector,” said Trump, who added, “Thank God.”
Despite Trump’s claim that he would use his time in office to advance MLK’s dream, which included true social and economic justice for Black Americans, King’s own children say they see nothing in his policies that reflect their father’s ideals.
In July 2025, Trump signed into law the One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act, which makes historic cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, which Black and underserved communities disproportionately rely on–all to cover Trump’s $4.5 trillion tax cuts that experts say will mostly benefit the wealthy and corporations.
“It’s about the government for all people, not just for one group of people, not just the rich folk,” said Martin Luther King III, who called out Trump’s $2 billion cuts to mental health funding, which the president ultimately reversed after backlash.
“I don’t understand that. How did you abandon these services?” King told theGrio.
The chairman of the Drum Major Institute said the country is “losing our humanity,” adding, “That will not serve anyone well, and especially us. We got to re-employ and re-engage and reassert humanity. Because when we do that…It is true when you know better, you kind of do better.” He added, “Maybe people don’t really know because they only listening in their own little silo and you got to expand that. And so part of our task is to create the climate for expansion.”
Dr. King’s daughter, Bernice King, was more pointed in her criticisms of the Trump administration. While delivering marks commemorating the King federal holiday on Monday, Dr. King’s youngest daughter blasted the president for his recent remarks suggesting that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which her father’s activism helped get passed into law, led to the discrimination of white people.
“It rewrites history in a way that fuels fear and resentment. My father and so many leaders of the movement…did not risk their lives to divide this nation,” said King, who serves as CEO of The King Center. “They did so because America was denying millions basic rights, the right to work, the right to vote, to live where they please, to move through society with dignity.”
Rejecting Trump’s politics of white grievance at the expense of racial justice, Bernice King said, “The Civil Rights Act did not give Black people special treatment. It made discrimination illegal. The same discrimination you’re trying to turn around and use.”
Despite the rollbacks that have jeopardized the progress for Black Americans made possible by King and countless other civil rights leaders, the youngest King child said adamantly, “We are not going backwards.”
