What Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy looks like in today’s movements

Each January, Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy is invoked as both history and a reminder that nonviolence was never passive. Social change, King and his followers taught, always required disciplined strategy, collective risk and moral clarity. At UCLA, that legacy has long been carried forward in the classroom through Labor Studies M173: Nonviolence and Social Movements, a course with an unusually direct lineage to the civil rights movement itself.

For more than two decades, the late Rev. James Lawson Jr., a close confidant of King's and one of the chief architects of nonviolent direct action, taught the course alongside labor leader Kent Wong, grounding students in the theory and practice that powered lunch counter sit-ins, freedom rides and worker organizing. When Lawson died in 2024 at the age of 95, the responsibility of continuing that legacy passed to Robin D.G. Kelley, UCLA's Gary B. Nash Professor of History and a renowned historian of Black freedom struggles whose own scholarship examines how social movements imagine and pursue freedom across generations.

Teaching the course during a period marked by global conflict, renewed student activism and political polarization, Kelley has approached nonviolence not as a relic of the past but as a living practice shaped by debate, history and experience - one that continues to shape how students understand power, resistance and responsibility.

In recognition of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Kelley spoke with UCLA Newsroom about what resonates most with students today, how movements evolve across generations and why nonviolence remains both urgent and unfinished.

Responses have been edited for brevity and clarity.

Rev. Lawson's close collaboration with Martin Luther King Jr. gave "Nonviolence and Social Movements" an unusually direct lineage to the civil rights movement and to King's philosophy of nonviolence. When today's UCLA students encounter King through the course's teachings, what aspects of his legacy seem to resonate most strongly?

Their first encounter with Dr. King is through Rev. Lawson's own writings and interviews, as well as footage of his nonviolence trainings in Nashville. Rev. Lawson was always far too humble to take credit for the movement's strategies and tactics, for which he is primarily responsible.

Students learn, for example, that Dr. King handpicked Rev. Lawson to be the primary strategist for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference - but because Lawson criticized the NAACP for its passivity and middle-class orientation, conventional civil rights leadership pressured King not to hire him.

We study a variety of movements King had led or was a part of, and because I do not limit our studies to civil rights, the students tend to be surprised by the extent to which he was involved in Northern fair housing struggles and with labor rights and anti-poverty and anti-war efforts. It is his antiwar and anti-imperialist politics that seem to resonate most with students, and secondarily his fight for fair housing, especially in Chicago.

The course has long emphasized nonviolence as a disciplined practice rooted in strategy, training and collective action rather than simply a moral stance. How have you approached teaching nonviolence to students who are engaging with contemporary movements shaped by urgency, polarization and social media-driven activism?

This is true, although the moral and ethical stance is the foundation of nonviolence. When I teach the course, however, we not only interrogate the moral arguments behind nonviolence but also look at a wide range of tactics and strategies, question the efficacy of nonviolence in certain circumstances, and explore the distinction between civil resistance, civil disobedience and "passive resistance."

Every generation is shaped by the urgency of "now" and polarization - which I don't believe is any greater than it has been in previous generations. What is different is the resurgence of fascism and the ascendency of authoritarian forces over the state. Social media is a different matter and not one I want to address in this class.

However, one crucial imperative of the course is to require students to participate in at least five hours of service-learning. For this, we must pay homage to Rev. Lawson's co-teacher, Kent Wong, who tragically passed away last year. I'd known Kent since 1983, and he was a wonderful colleague whose tireless efforts as director of the UCLA Labor Center not only made our university an international leader in research, education and policy with respect to labor unions and working conditions but is primarily responsible for launching the UCLA James Lawson Jr. Worker Justice Center in downtown L.A.

Kent insisted on having a service-learning requirement as part of the class, which I continued. Under his guidance, many students worked with "dreamers" in launching Dream Summer, the first national fellowship program for undocumented youth, and organized with him on the Opportunity for All campaign, an effort to remove the ban on the UC system employing undocumented students. Others worked with groups as diverse as Mutual Aid Los Angeles Network, Critical Resistance Los Angeles, Los Angeles Community Action Network and Stop LAPD Spying.

One of the course's defining features has been its insistence that history is not static and that movements continue to unfold through students' own lives and organizing. After your first year teaching the class, how do you see UCLA students carrying forward the intellectual and ethical legacy of Rev. Lawson and, by extension, Martin Luther King Jr., in ways that feel distinctly their own?

I suspect that this winter quarter, many of our students will sign up for trainings to resist agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and of Customs and Border Protection abducting people in our cities.

But for me, the question is less about what students take away than what they bring to the class. Almost half of the students in my last class had been a part of the campus Palestine Solidarity Encampment in spring 2024. The students were following the lead of other universities, as well as the history of anti-apartheid "shantytowns" from my generation, which in the 1980s demanded the university divest from South Africa. These nonviolent protesters were attacked by a group of counter-protesters - without police intervention for several hours. Soon after, the administration requested that law enforcement dismantle the encampment. As a result of these and related activities, student protesters experienced arrests, disciplinary hearings and suspensions. Several students who wished to take this class could not do so because of this.

The point should be obvious: Students are already engaged, so "teaching" is a two-way street. I not only included the encampment and divest movements in the curriculum, but I invited campus activists to talk about their experiences.