Reflecting on the 1/6 White Supremacist Insurrection on Martin Luther King Day

For those who don’t know me, I’m Adam Fernandez, a civil rights attorney and Vice President of Lawyers for Good Government (L4GG). I drafted our sign-on letter (now signed by more than 15,000 members of the L4GG community) calling for Trump’s impeachment, removal, and disqualification. If you haven’t joined it yet, please do so now; it is open to attorneys and non-attorneys alike.

This Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I wanted to share some words of Dr. King that have given me strength over the years. As a civil rights attorney of color from the deep south, I’ve received more than one credible death threat over the years — some people feel threatened by my mere existence. There’s a common theme between those death threats and the January 6 insurrection: both radiated clear and unarguable white supremacy.

In the months and years after my death threats, I read a lot, but none centered me more than the writings of Dr. King. He was a man repeatedly threatened by white supremacists, whose house was fire-bombed with his wife and child inside, and who still preached radical love. When white supremacists attacked the Capitol on January 6, I immediately turned again to the writings of Dr. King to sort through my own feelings. If you haven’t read much of Dr. King’s writings, I recommend starting with The Radical King edited by Cornell West, but if I had to pick one writing that helped me the most it would be “Loving Your Enemies”:

Probably no admonition of Jesus has been more difficult to follow than the command to “love your enemies.” Some men have sincerely felt that its actual practice is not possible. It is easy, they say, to love those who love you, but how can one love those who openly and insidiously seek to defeat you? … Forgiveness does not mean ignoring what has been done or putting a false label on an evil act … [but also] we must not seek to defeat or humiliate the enemy…. The chain reaction of evil — hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars — must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation…. We must in strength and humility meet hate with love.

Radical love doesn’t mean accepting defeat or ignoring an evil act. It means actively fighting for justice, but with love in our hearts. That’s what brought me to become a civil rights attorney, how I responded to my own death threats, and how we as a country must respond to the grave threat of the ongoing white supremacist insurrection.

We must reject disingenuous calls for unity that seek to ignore the evil acts perpetrated at the capitol; calls for unity that put false labels on those evil acts; or calls for unity that seek to hide those responsible from justice and history. But so too must we rise over our raw emotions and recognize that reflexively acting on those emotions will only make matters worse. Now is not the time for retributive justice. It is the time for restorative justice, for addressing the underlying causes of the crime — white supremacy.

So as we work to rebuild our country in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, we must address white supremacy.

We need voting rights and democracy reform that respects the rights of all, like the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and H.R. 1.

We need political appointments and judges that reflect America’s demographic diversity and who have a demonstrated commitment to challenging injustice.

We need law enforcement reform and educational programs that acknowledge the humanity and dignity of people of color.

We need these not just for the sake of people of color, but for white Americans as well.

At L4GG, we will continue the fight against white supremacy, working to change the law to remove structural inequities that have long predated Trump, but that Trump and his insurrectionists laid bare.

But where our opposition is motivated by their hatred for us, we will fight for justice with love in our hearts. And that’s why we will win.