Thousands of Minnesotans gather at star-studded events to mark MLK Holiday

Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder called on the crowd of 2,400 people at the Armory in Minneapolis to ask themselves what they were doing to realize the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of equality and consider how they could “heal this obviously divided nation, as he sought to do.”

Holder said he could never have predicted how the trail blazed by the civil rights leader would impact his own decades later as the first black attorney general under the country’s first black president, Barack Obama. But as keynote speaker at the 30th annual MLK Holiday Breakfast, he also urged the crowd not to gather once a year to make King a vision from the past, but rather to make him a guide to a better future and protect the advances he made.

“We must not look back toward a past that was comforting to too few and unjust to too many — that is not how you make America great,” said Holder, taking a veiled dig at President Donald Trump. “…We must not give in to irrational fear and manufactured division, but instead embrace needed trust and national unity.” Continue reading.