By Marian Wright Edelman
On an extraordinary day when an estimated five million people came together at rallies and protests across the country to share their political views nonviolently, political violence still struck our nation. On June 14, Minnesota State Representative and Democratic caucus leader Melissa Hortman was assassinated in a shooting at her home alongside her husband, Mark. Earlier that same morning, Minnesota State Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette were shot and injured in their home. Police found a list of nearly 70 other potential targets, many of them fellow lawmakers, in the gunman’s car.
Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, a former executive director of Children’s Defense Fund-Minnesota, served under then-Speaker Hortman as a member of the Minnesota House of Representatives and called her colleague and friend “a leader’s leader. I watched her do the right thing over and over again.” She described Rep. Hortman this way: “Melissa Hortman’s entire life was dedicated to others. She was an incredible leader who was very selfless, had very little ego. She avoided a lot of the ‘political stuff,’ but she didn’t use the word ‘stuff.’ I think about all of the things over the last couple of years that we’ve been able to accomplish together, like paid family and medical leave, a nation-leading child tax credit, feeding kids, putting protections into law for reproductive health. Those things got done because she pushed and planned and brought her caucus together and she had such tenacity to get results. Her legacy will benefit generations of Minnesotans to come . . . But these legislative victories that will live on is just one small part of who she was. She was a mom, and we talked about what it meant to raise girls in this moment. She was a gardener. She loved dogs, she loved her dog Gilbert . . . She was just a fantastic, fun person.” In a statement she also said: “I’m outraged that we live in a country where this level of violence is occurring to the extent where it is practically commonplace. And for what purpose? We can’t become intimidated by this act of terrorism. This will not stop me and it should not stop you. We must keep fighting for all the values that Melissa held so dear.”
Just a few weeks ago I wrote about the speech Senator Robert F. Kennedy gave the day after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, where he spoke about the “the mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives.” Dr. King had touched on a similar theme himself shortly after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, when he wrote that it was time for our nation to do some soul-searching, and while the question “Who killed President Kennedy?” was important, answering the question “What killed President Kennedy?” was even more critical. Dr. King said he believed “our late President was assassinated by a morally inclement climate”: “It is a climate filled with heavy torrents of false accusation, jostling winds of hatred, and raging storms of violence. It is a climate where men cannot disagree without being disagreeable, and where they express dissent through violence and murder.” Dr. King also noted that the undercurrents of hatred and violence that made up this morally inclement climate were fueled by our cultural embrace of guns: “By our readiness to allow arms to be purchased at will and fired at whim, by allowing our movie and television screens to teach our children that the hero is one who masters the art of shooting and the technique of killing, by allowing all these developments, we have created an atmosphere in which violence and hatred have become popular pastimes.”
Our nation continues to be ravaged by the same storms. In his eulogy at Dr. King’s funeral, former Morehouse College President Dr. Benjamin E. Mays said: “Here was a man who believed with all of his might that the pursuit of violence at any time is ethically and morally wrong; that God and the moral weight of the universe are against it; that violence is self-defeating; and that only love and forgiveness can break the vicious circle of revenge. He believed that nonviolence would prove effective in the abolition of injustice in politics, in economics, in education, and in race relations. He was convinced, also, that people could not be moved to abolish voluntarily the inhumanity of man to man by mere persuasion and pleading, but that they could be moved to do so by dramatizing the evil through massive nonviolent resistance . . . He believed that the nonviolent approach to solving social problems would ultimately prove to be redemptive.” His belief is echoed by the millions of Americans of all backgrounds who are still determined to reject hate and to use nonviolent means to make their own voices heard.
In their own statement after their parents’ murders, Melissa and Mark Hortman’s children Sophie and Colin urged others to “stand up for what you believe in, especially if that thing is justice and peace”: “Hope and resilience are the enemy of fear. Our parents lived their lives with immense dedication to their fellow humans. This tragedy must become a moment for us to come together. Hold your loved ones a little closer. Love your neighbors. Treat each other with kindness and respect. The best way to honor our parents’ memory is to do something, whether big or small, to make our community just a little better for someone else.”