On Martin Luther King Jr. Day last month, the Facebook account for the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office posted a quote from the famed civil rights activist: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Of course, this post from the Sheriff’s Office, and other commemorative statements of King made by right-wing figures, are steeped in hypocrisy.
Sheriff Austin Garrett collaborating with federal immigration authorities in President Donald Trump’s mass ethnic cleansing campaign could in no way be fairly described as an act of justice. Any honest assessment of the modern Republican Party would identify it as a hostile force against racial equity, the very thing King fought and died for.
This post from Garrett’s office, however, is not just hypocritical. It lacks a basic understanding of what King was trying to communicate. The reverend was not advocating for some strict enforcement of justice. He was making a moral argument — a moral demand — for civil disobedience.
The context of King’s words makes this clear. The civil rights leader wrote them while imprisoned in 1963 for illegally demonstrating against Jim Crow laws in the South — the quote comes from King’s famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”