A Welcome to 2026

In 2026, we will commemorate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In the United States, the fight for liberty, equality, and justice has had a long and complex history.

Before, during, and after the American Revolution, people fought for their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as well as securing blessings for their descendants. Through politics, organizing, boycott, protest, litigation, war, and other campaigns, people have often challenged America to live up to its highest ideals.

As history is not static, examining stories of progress and setbacks helps us better understand how our past shapes and impacts our present as we move toward living up to our highest ideals.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday provides an opportunity for all of us to reflect upon the words of one of the most prominent Americans who called upon us all to live up to our highest ideals.

Dr. King’s last book before his assassination was “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?” In reflecting upon the many conflicts in our world at this moment — from at home in Minneapolis to abroad in Venezuela, Iran, and Africa – I would like to include a passage that feels appropriate to share with you:

“A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look at thousands of working people displaced from their jobs with reduced incomes as a result of automation while the profits of the employers remain intact and say: “This is not just.”

It will look across the oceans and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of those countries and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. 

A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love.

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values.

There is nothing to prevent us from paying adequate wages to schoolteachers, social workers, and other servants of the public to ensure that we have the best available personnel in these positions which are charged with the responsibility of guiding our future generations.

There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American citizen whether he be a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid, or day laborer. There is nothing except shortsightedness to prevent us from guaranteeing an annual minimum—and livable—income for every American family.

There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from remolding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a [new beloved community].”

In the upcoming year, the Minnesota Humanities Center will be working with several organizations to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

I hope that you will join us as we seek to meet the challenge of Dr. King, within Chaos or Community, to “call our beloved nation to a higher destiny, to a new plateau of compassion, to a more noble expression of humanness.”