In the year prior to his assassination, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King isolated himself in a house in Jamaica where he wrote what was to become his final book. King said he felt at home there: “In Jamaica, I feel like a human being.” “One day, here in America,” said King, “I hope that we will see this, and we will become one big family of Americans.”
50 years later, it is an aching American tragedy that we find ourselves with issues of race, arguably, as emotional, divisive and consequential as in King’s time. The culmination of King’s thinking in Jamaica ultimately became the book “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?” In it he offers this stark warning: “Together we must learn to live together as brothers or together we will be forced to perish as fools.” Our failure to “live together as brothers” has gone to seed in what increasingly feels like the chaos King foreshadowed.
U.S. President Donald walks toward reporters while departing the White House on September 11, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images) 
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox speaks at a press conference flanked by FBI director Kash Patel following the fatal shooting of political activist Charlie Kirk during an event at Utah Valley University on September 12, 2025 in Orem, Utah. (Photo by Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images)