On Monday we’re celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day and inaugurating Donald Trump as the 47th president of the United States. That may seem like an odd pairing, especially to those of us who believe Mr. Trump has fueled a culture of skepticism, denial and indifference to matters of injustice.

But if Dr. King’s life taught us anything, it is that hope is most useful when the evidence runs the other way toward despair. Set against dark times, hope points us toward something better.

Dr. King’s ministry took place in a country marked by segregation, an unpopular war abroad and the widespread social and economic disenfranchisement of African Americans.

This is not 1963. But the troubled times many of us feel we are in make Dr. King’s message especially relevant.

The occasion of his “I Have a Dream” speech, the 1963 March on Washington, came in the wake of a long season of anti-Black violence. In May of that year protests against racial segregation in Birmingham, Ala., which came to be known as the Children’s Crusade, had been met with fire hoses, police dogs and batons. That same month saw an angry mob assault the sit-in that took place at a Woolworth’s in Jackson, Miss. In June, the civil rights activist Medgar Evers was murdered outside his home, also in Jackson.

When Dr. King imagined in his speech that someday “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will sit down together at the table of brotherhood,” that dream served as an alternative to the bloody and dispiriting reality of the present.

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