Civil rights activist Bernice King, daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., accused the pastor who offered the benediction at Donald Trump’s inauguration of having “misused” her father’s ideas to paper over how “inconvenient truth” Republicans’ agenda clashes with the legendary leader’s vision of a more just America.
During the ceremony, Pastor Lorenzo Sewell riffed off key parts of King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” on the National Mall.
“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,” Sewell told the crowd.
He also, like King, quoted from an old African-American spiritual, hoping that in America everyone will feel “free at last.”
Bernice King, writing on X on Wednesday, claimed the original speech had “been misused to weaken its clear messaging about ending racism, stopping police brutality, ensuring voting rights, and eradicating economic injustice.”
“Why didn’t Pastor Lorenzo Sewell pray these parts of the Dream during President Trump’s Inauguration?” she continued. “Because 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.”
The Trump administration has moved quickly to roll back diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and protections across the federal government, some of which have roots in King’s 1960s-era activism.
“I prayed to my Heavenly Father, in the name of Jesus and was inspired by Dr. King,” Sewell told The Independent via email. “I apologize if I offended her, but I did not read her dad’s speech, just prayed from my heart.”
The original “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered during the 1963 March on Washington, was considerably more pointed than the banal call for colorblindness many claim it represented.
In the address, prior to calling for a world of people judged solely on the content of their character, King denounces police brutality, housing segregation, and the “vicious” racists who sought to impede Black equality in America.
Elsewhere, in other famous works like 1963’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” King advocated taking ambitious moves to create equity and singled out “the white moderate” as a bigger obstacle to freedom than the Klu Klux Klan.
“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed,” King wrote. “Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct-action movement that was ‘well timed’ according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation.”
