Making “Good Trouble” Four Decades Apart

Gonca Sönmez-Poole

Today, January 19, 2026, marks a day of celebration in the United States, in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., a human rights defender who, in 1968, paid the ultimate price for standing by his fight for social justice and against race discrimination.

On the other side of the Atlantic in the country of Turkey (and beyond) it is a day of commemoration for another human rights defender by the name of Hrant Dink, assassinated on January 19, 2007.

These two remarkable individuals never met and their respective struggles for justice may not be directly related and yet their stories are essential for understanding the connections that must be made if we believe in “making good trouble,” in the words of John Lewis, Dr. King’s protege and close ally.

The lives of these two remarkable individuals were marked by repressive regimes that forced their own selective narratives upon their citizens. When Dr. King became the leader of the civil rights movement with his amazing oratory skills and practice of non-violent resistance, he knew his ancestors had previously been paying the price of government-imposed narratives that considered them a threat to national security.

Similarly, when Hrant Dink founded the first Armenian-Turkish weekly newspaper Agos and dug into the stories of those Ottoman Armenians who had lost their entire families during the genocide of 1915, he was facing a similar narrative imposed upon him when Turkish officialdom labeled him a “traitor” to the nation.

There is a Turkish expression called “ezber bozmak” loosely translated as “unmaking what’s memorized,” it means “disrupting a narrative.” Both Dr. King and Hrant Dink were examples of those individuals who, despite the threat to their lives, would not give up the mission of speaking truth to power…of going after the truths that repressive regimes would rather avoid and/or conceal. The legacy of their fight against discrimination and injustice is not limited to the lands they were born in. From Myanmar to Gaza, from Iran to Russia, the battle of the narratives grinds on in front of our eyes. The authoritarians of the world insist on labeling anyone with an alternative perspective as traitors or sometimes terrorists and their actions as mostly instigated by “foreign outsiders.”

In our own country, the government condones the killing of a female citizen by labeling her a “domestic terrorist,” similar to the way Iran’s mullahs are claiming those rebelling against the regime are simply pawns of foreign forces. In Gaza, there is overwhelming proof of the state of Israel committing indefensible violations of human rights and yet that state’s narrative retains its own perspective based solely on its own security. And in Russia, a dictator (much admired by the President of the United States) has been continuing its own false narrative about a war he started against Ukraine, much to the detriment of an education system that is force-fed the extremes of militaristic nationalism. In a fascinating documentary titled Mr. Nobody Against Putin primary school students are forced to memorize and present scripts written and fed to educators by the powers that be. The Russian teacher who documented this educational nightmare had to flee Russia helped by the film’s co-director. It is unclear whether Putin and his cohorts will target him in exile when the film becomes publicly available in just a few days.

What is clear is that the road for those “making good trouble” by disrupting age-old narratives is paved with much struggle and in worst cases by cold-blooded murder. Dr. King paid the ultimate price for his non-violent struggle against discrimination when he was shot on April 4, 1968. Nearly four decades later, Hrant Dink who refused to flee the land he called home was murdered in cold-blood on January 19, 2007.

They both may have paid the ultimate price by losing their lives before their mission was fulfilled, but their legacy will go on. There are connections to be made all around our communities, our countries and our entire world.  As we mourn the passing of heroes such as Dr. King and Hrant Dink, we must continue to believe in the power of hope against odds…of making good trouble for a better future for all the world’s children.