On Monday, the United States will undertake its annual, uneasy ritual of honoring the legacy of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It is a day designated for service, a call to build what he called the “Beloved Community.”
Yet in New Jersey this week, the bureaucracy managed to announce the holiday without uttering the American civil right martyr’s name.
In a press release detailing closures for the “state holiday,” the Motor Vehicle Commission erased the man to whom the day is dedicated.
This may be no more than an oversight; but it could be a microcosm of a nation that has learned to sanitize the struggle while perpetuating the divisions King died to heal.
The press release from William Connolly, the MVC’s press secretary, was a masterpiece of bureaucratic void. It efficiently noted the closure of agencies, road test sites, and inspection stations on January 19.
It directed citizens to online services. It called the day a “state holiday.”
The name Martin Luther King Jr. was conspicuously absent, as if the hero were a distraction from the business of government.
“All New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission (NJMVC) facilities, including agencies, road test sites, and inspection stations, will be closed Monday, January 19, 2026, in observance of the state holiday.
“NJMVC facilities will be open for regular business the rest of the week, including on Saturday, January 17.
“The Commission’s website at NJMVC.gov remains open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
“New Jerseyans in need of motor vehicle services should always visit the website first to access over 25 online services, book appointments for in-person services, and find answers to common NJMVC customer questions.”
One wonders if the notices for Christmas or the Fourth of July would be so bloodlessly generic. This is not efficiency; it is disrespect, a quiet bleaching of history from the very halls that history forced open.
This carelessness finds fertile ground in the soil of a bitter and enduring national conflict. The fight to establish this holiday is a forgotten parable for our current age.
When President Ronald Reagan finally signed the bill in 1983, it was over the vicious opposition of senators like Jesse Helms of North Carolina, who smeared King with the false, reliable poison of “action-oriented Marxism.”
The political calculus was as naked then as it is now. A Republican strategist admitted at the time that Helms’s stand was meant for “the groups he is playing to,” a genteel way of saying he was trafficking in racism for political gain.
The final vote tallies told the story: the overwhelming opposition came from the Republican party.
The legislation passed the House 338 to 90, while the final vote in the Senate was 78–22.
At that time, 77 House Republicans and 18 Senate Republicans voted against the measure, but only 4 Democrats in each chamber joined the opposition.
They scrambled then, as some do now, to manage the damage of their rhetoric while still harvesting its fruit. The strategy has simply evolved, trading the fiery filibuster for cooler, more surgical instruments of division.
Today, the legacy of that opposition lives in gerrymandered districts that “pack and crack” minority voters, in systemic inequalities brushed aside as individual failures, and in a political discourse where “communist” has been replaced by other incendiary labels meant to trigger the same fears.
Five months before he died, King announced the Poor People’s Campaign at a staff retreat for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), seeking a “middle ground between riots on the one hand and timid supplications for justice on the other.”
Through nonviolent direct action, King and SCLC hoped to focus the nation’s attention on economic inequality and poverty. Much of the Trump administration’s energy has been spent dismantling programs established as a result of that campaign, and its manfestation as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs.
To observe King’s day without speaking his name is to participate in this devolution.
It reduces a bloody, glorious, and unfinished revolution for justice to a mere day off—a three-day weekend for some, a logistical inconvenience for a motor vehicle agency.
It separates the service from the sacrifice that necessitated it.
The 1994 King Holiday and Service Act envisioned a day of active remembrance, not passive closure. The New Jersey commission’s release, in its stark omission, represents the opposite: a closure of memory, a shuttering of context.
America has never been honest with itself about race, preferring the monuments to the man, the holiday to the hardship. We have enshrined a dreamer while dismissing the dream as fulfilled.
The bitter division is not just around Dr. King; it is within us, between the version of history we celebrate and the one we live.
The New Jersey notice is a small symptom.
The disease is the persistent, partisan use of racial strife as a tool for power, a strategy that continues to work because we allow the very name of our heroes to be treated as optional, while the forces they fought are still diligently, precisely named and served.
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