MLK Day "Freedom School": Practicing the World We Want to Build

A School of Us pop-up series and call to action in Marysville/Tulalip, WA (and wherever you live). Join our temporary Signal group to receive updates Jan 18th-20th about scheduled activities and how to get involved.

What is this?
This MLK Weekend, The School of Us is hosting a loose series of pop-up community experiments—part folk school, part reflection space, part gentle rehearsal for the kind of collective courage this moment may be asking of us.

I’m thinking of MLK Day as a “practice day”: a day for learning, noncompliance with business-as-usual, relationship-building, and moral imagination—rooted in the tradition of nonviolent social movements and Dr. King’s call for a revolution of values.
This is not a single event in one room. It’s a constellation of small, local, human-scaled actions and gatherings across the day, some public, some quiet, all voluntary.

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Why MLK Day?
Dr. King understood that justice doesn’t emerge only from speeches or institutions—it’s practiced, imperfectly, by ordinary people learning how to stand together.
At a time when many of our political, economic, and social systems feel brittle or misaligned with human dignity, this day is an invitation to ask:

> Who do we want to be for each other—and how do we practice that now?

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What might happen (nothing mandatory)
Depending on who shows up and what feels right, the day may include:

• Public readings or listenings of MLK’s speeches (including Beyond Vietnam) in coffee shops, bars, or faith spaces, followed by reflection and conversation in the tradition of movement education
• Group sing-alongs of spirituals and other nonviolent movement songs, as a way to build courage, memory, connection, and joy
• Personal “pause” from business-as-usual (employment, consumer purchases, debt, taxes) for those who are able, as a form of reflection on work, consumption, and complicity
• Acts of mutual aid, hospitality, or amplification, especially in support of people who are taking greater risks
• Gentle, relational community actions in shared public spaces, grounded in care, visibility, and nonviolence
• Leading up to MLK Day: phone calls, conversations, and door-knocks with people we love—neighbors, elders, faith and community leaders—asking honest questions about this moment and what responsibility looks like now

Some people may join one piece. Some may join several. Showing up for a single conversation counts.

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What this is not

• Not a march or a rally
• Not a directive or a demand
• Not a test of ideological purity
• Not about telling anyone what they should do

This is a learning space, not a command.

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Who this is for
This gathering is for people who:

• Feel unsettled by the direction of things and don’t want to numb out
• Are curious about nonviolent resistance, moral witness, and collective care
• Want to practice being braver, kinder, and more connected—together
• Believe that how we organize now shapes what becomes possible later

You do not need prior experience with activism. You do not need to agree on everything. You just need a willingness to learn in public and treat others with dignity.

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A note on care and consent
All participation is voluntary. We will prioritize nonviolence, safety, consent, and care for one another, and we’ll stay grounded in conversation and reflection rather than confrontation.

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Why The School of Us
The School of Us exists to practice learning together at moments when the old scripts no longer work—and before crisis forces our hand.
This MLK Day is one small attempt to do that with intention.
Come for curiosity. Stay for connection. Take what’s useful. Leave the rest.

Further Reading and Learning:
Here's an excerpt from "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence," which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered at Riverside Church exactly a year before he was assassinated:

"One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, 'This is not just.' It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, 'This is not just.' The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.
A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, 'This way of settling differences is not just.' This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood."