Martin Luther King, Jr., on the Cover of The New Yorker

Last week, testifying at the confirmation hearing of Jeff Sessions, John Lewis, the Georgia congressman and civil-rights hero, whom the President-elect has dismissed as “all talk, talk, talk—no action or results,” said, “We’ve made progress, but we are not there yet. There are forces that want to take us back to another place. We don’t want to go back. We want to go forward.” The image of Martin Luther King, Jr., serves as a reminder, all the more urgently needed this year, that the march of progress can be made even in the face of forces pulling us back. In January of 2015, in the wake of protests over the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, Barry Blitt’s “The Dream of Reconciliation” drew inspiration from photographs of the Selma-to-Montgomery March. “It struck me that King’s vision was both the empowerment of African-Americans, the insistence on civil rights, but also the reconciliation of people who seemed so hard to reconcile,” Blitt said. That sentiment was echoed again this year on the cover of the January 16, 2017, issue, in “After Dr. King,” by Kadir Nelson, who asked, “What would Dr. King think of the world today?”