On Monday the Island will join the rest of the nation in celebrating the birthday of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and what he stood for in his nonviolent struggle for equal rights and justice for all.

Dr. King, who was cut down by an assassin’s bullet on April 4, 1964, would have been 88 on Sunday.

And what better way to observe the life and leadership of the man than to recall his own words, spoken from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, before hundreds of thousands of people stretching from the Tidal Basin to the Washington Monument:

“I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’”

And in Oslo, Norway, on December 10, 1964, upon accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Dr. King spoke these words:

“I am mindful that only yesterday in Birmingham, Alabama, our children, crying out for brotherhood, were answered with fire hoses, snarling dogs and even death . . . I am mindful that debilitating and grinding poverty affects my people and chains them to the lowest rung of the economic ladder.”

The Vineyard has its own unique connection with Dr. King, one of so many African Americans who have found respite and fellowship on the Island during summer visits.

A personal note signed by him rests in the Gazette archives, noting how one summer seven years before he was assassinated, “I spent the whole month of August working on a manuscript . . . this made it impossible for me to accept many of the invitations that came to me during my month on the Island.”

The Island is justifiably proud of its history as a place apart from the mainland, a place where African Americans were welcomed when they were not elsewhere. Above all, the Island has been a place of tolerance and community, where we accept and rely on each other. Dr. King once said that we have to decide whether we “will walk in the light of creative altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness.”

But the pendulum swings. With the inauguration of the 45th President of the United States a week away, the divisions in the country – and perhaps the Island — are deeper than at any time in recent memory. There is anger, expressed now more often and more openly on social media.

There is fear, including among immigrants, who worry that the new President will make good on his promise to deport millions of undocumented immigrants from the U.S. Some of this fear bubbled out this week during a forum on immigration hosted by a newly-formed group to promote social justice. The Vineyard is home to a significant community of immigrants, many of them Portuguese-speaking Brazilians. Some are legal, some are not.

There is hope too. Individuals and groups, stunned by the election, are waking up from despair and turning to action. At the forum, attorneys and law enforcement leaders sought to reassure immigrants that they would not be singled out for harsh treatment on Martha’s Vineyard.

And in an echo of the original March on Washington at which Dr. King gave his stirring Dream speech, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, including many from the Island, are preparing to march in solidarity for women on January 21, the day after the inauguration.

For now, the Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday is expected to pass quietly on the Island, falling as it does in the cold month of January. The Vineyard is at its deep-quiet ebb now. Many businesses are shuttered until spring, and a good number of Islanders have fled to warmer climes for a few weeks or a few months.

The NAACP membership dinner held annually to mark Dr. King’s birthday was once a vibrant, must-attend social and political affair that attracted Islanders of all walks of life to come out for an evening of fellowship and conversation.

The dinner faded some years back as leadership changed at the Vineyard chapter of the NAACP. Perhaps Islanders felt less need to commemorate the important, but fragile gains made by the civil rights movement and championed by Dr. King.

The dinner is back this year. All are welcome at the Portuguese American Club from two to five p.m. to honor the memory of a man with a dream that still eludes us. And if the dinner is not the large celebratory affair it once was, that door has been reopened a crack.