[Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 11 (Thursday, January 15, 2026)]
[House]
[Pages H911-H912]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    HONORING MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

  (Ms. SIMON asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute.)
  Ms. SIMON. Mr. Speaker, in 1968, 75 percent of Americans disapproved 
of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Today is his birthday.
  The FBI called him the most dangerous Negro in America. They 
wiretapped his home and his office. They sent him a letter, suggesting 
that he should take his own life. King kept walking.
  One year before Memphis, at Riverside Church, he said what cost him 
resources and allies. He said: ``The greatest purveyor of violence in 
the world today is my own government.'' He said: ``A nation that 
continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than 
on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.''
  Then he built the Poor People's Campaign. Black, White, and Brown 
came together, demanding that Congress address poverty in the richest 
Nation on this Earth.
  This is the King that we must remember, not the safe icon but the 
dangerous peacemaker. He wrote: ``I refuse to accept despair as the 
final response to the ambiguities of history.''

[[Page H912]]

  As we honor his legacy, let us refuse what he refused. Let us walk 
where he walked: Toward justice, toward the oughtness that forever 
confronts us.

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