Judge Jerry Blackwell urged congregants not to give up hope amid America’s time of anxiety and fear, and instead shine their lights to overcome it. (Photo: screengrab from service livestream.)
Judge Jerry Blackwell, a Minnesota district court judge who helped prosecute Derek Chauvin for the 2020 murder of George Floyd, urged attendees of Sunday’s Martin Luther King Jr. service at Duke University to “retake your place in the march toward the American ideal” and overcome the fear and despair of the times.
The service held at Duke University Chapel each year honors the life of King and centers on the themes of hope and justice. Speakers included Duke University President Vincent Price and Durham Mayor Leonardo Williams among other student and faculty voices. The United in Praise Gospel Choir performed “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and the service concluded with congregants joining together to sing the civil rights anthem, “We Shall Overcome.”
Looming over the event was President-elect Donald Trump’s return to office Monday, a transition that multiple speakers alluded to without identifying directly. Williams, a Democrat, observed the country was entering “a different time, politically.” Blackwell’s speech centered on maintaining hope and resolve amid “anxiety and fear about today” and “a sense of foreboding about tomorrow” — a feeling of darkness throughout the country that he compared to the damp air enveloping the campus amid Sunday’s intermittent rain showers.
Though he stressed he was “not talking politics at all,” Blackwell took aim at those who condemn the values of diversity and inclusion in the U.S. as weaknesses, noting that the founding ideal of America is exemplified in the nation’s Latin motto, e pluribus unum — “out of many, one.”
“Strength in unity, strength in inclusion, strength in the mutual validation of one another — now ladies and gentlemen, I am telling you, that if you think that is wokeness and wrong historically, then the very idea of America — e pluribus unum — is wrong historically,” Blackwell said. “If that ideal represents disunity, then how can there be any concept of unity?”
He urged those listening to do their part to “solve the problem of disunity,” telling them that the success of the American experiment depends on the nation’s people coming together to solve their common problems. Quoting former Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, he emphasized that the Constitution “foresees their participation” and without it, the system of government and democracy itself “will not work.”
“Whatever your political stripe, whatever your orientation, we rise or fall together as will all of the buttons on one common shirt,” Blackwell said, alluding to King’s concept of a single garment of destiny. “As much as some people today might wish that some state or another in America might just break off and just float away — problem solved — nobody’s going anywhere.”
Urging hope through despair, Blackwell invoked an original parable he called “Three Angels in One Cave.” In it, three angels who had never known darkness were sent to a cave to learn how to confront and overcome it with only a bag containing two sticks. The first proposes crying and praying for relief as a show of faith, while the second suggests confronting the darkness with violence to show fearlessness, but both strategies fail. In physically fighting the darkness, they harm only themselves, he says. Only when they make use of the sticks — a match and candle — to create light is the darkness successfully repelled.
“Martin Luther King tells us that darkness can never drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that,” Blackwell said. “Shine the light of truth — shine your light in great ways, small ways — and it reveals, ultimately, the dishonesty, the disunity, of falsehood.”
Blackwell noted that King “laid down his life” for the ideal of unity in America, the dream of a country embodying that ideal of e pluribus unum in which “people of all races, of all nationalities, and all creeds can live together as brothers.” He urged those gathered in the chapel to consider how they might carry that dream forward.
“Sit at the table of public life and mutual welfare. Sip a cup of participation. America needs you,” he said. “The rent you pay for the short-term lease that we call life on this planet is to do something that makes it a better place for somebody other than just you.”