With our never-ending sticker shock at the grocery store, we’re all looking to pinch pennies. But if you were thinking of taking the fam to a national park on Martin Luther King Day this coming Monday, the free admissions of the past are, well, a thing of the past. Same goes for Juneteenth.
Hmm, what could these two holidays — one honoring an incandescently eloquent civil rights leader, in January, the other a summer celebration commemorating the end of slavery in the U.S., in 1865 — have in common?
As you ponder, we’ll note that while those two holidays have been taken off the free schedule, if you wait til summer, you can go gratis on Flag Day, June 14, and the July 4th weekend.
“But wait a sec,” muses that dimly perceivable civics student in your mind, “Flag Day isn’t a national holiday. It’s a day to honor the stars and stripes — perhaps by wearing a flag pin to work.”
“But it will be President Donald J. Trump’s 80th birthday!” crows that overly mascara’d (if female) or portly and gray-haired (if male) Fox News commentator, wafting up from the polluted swamp that is our age’s Jungian pool.
In democracies, major leaders usually have the decency to die before something other than a presidential library or a charitable foundation is named in their honor. Think of the Presidents’ Day federal holiday (you can include any POTUS of your choice in your heart), the FDR Drive, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Tappan Zee — er — the Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge, and the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, as just a few examples. And yes, the Gipper was alive in 1998 when his name was added to the original 1941 “Washington” designation, but he’d been out of office for almost a decade and had publicly announced his Alzheimer’s diagnosis four years earlier, so Bill Clinton (of Bill Clinton Boulevard, in Pristina, Kosovo fame) felt that POTUS No. 40 was due the recognition.
It’s a fair bet that our current president has not read many of King’s speeches (though his first wife, Ivana, famously reported that he kept a collection of Adolf Hitler’s rants for bedtime reading).
But we now have the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts — not even alphabetical order is safe in the U.S. under the current commander in chief — and, as mentioned, one can, if so inclined, don red, white, and blue longjohns or a similar ensemble and celebrate the current POTUS’s birthday for free at selected national parks on Flag Day, a taxpayer-financed ego blast similar to last year’s controversial (and ultimately lackluster) combined 250th Anniversary of the Army / DJT 79th B-Day bash.
But you can leave all such bluster behind this Monday by joining fellow New Yorkers in honoring the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. This 40th-annual MLK event will include Jeffrey Wright, Zohran Mamdani, Letitia James, Alvin Bragg, and Jumaane Williams reading the text of King’s “The Drum Major Instinct” sermon.
Like all great oratory this speech lives for the ages, bringing the past startlingly into present focus, such as in this prescient observation, delivered on February 4, 1968, only two months before King was assassinated, in Memphis:
They have 20-megaton bombs in Russia right now that can destroy a city as big as New York in three seconds, with everybody wiped away, and every building. And we can do the same thing to Russia and China.
But this is why we are drifting. And we are drifting there because nations are caught up with the drum major instinct. “I must be first.” “I must be supreme.” “Our nation must rule the world.” And I am sad to say that the nation in which we live is the supreme culprit. And I’m going to continue to say it to America, because I love this country too much to see the drift that it has taken.
It’s a fair bet that our current president has not read many of King’s speeches (though his first wife, Ivana, famously reported that he kept a collection of Adolf Hitler’s rants for bedtime reading), so such resonant rhetoric is lost on him. But King’s words will hopefully continue guiding the rest of us toward our better angels, even if sometimes the march there feels endless. Perhaps activism will on some future day intersect with another of King’s great observations, this one from 1965, which he in turn borrowed from an 1852 speech by the abolitionist Theodore Parker and shortened to “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Here’s hoping. ❖
The 40th Annual Tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Brooklyn Academy of Music
30 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn
Monday, January 19, 2026
