The Wire Staff 
New Delhi: Abolitionist Angela Davis has spoken of confronting finite disappointments with infinite hope, quoting Martin Luther King Junior, on whose birth anniversary Donald Trump was inaugurated as US president.
As reported by Democracy Now!, Davis’s speech at the 2025 Inaugural Peace Ball at the Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater, started with the missive that a “lot more is happening in the world than the inauguration of someone who represents fascism in this country and the world.”
The Peace Ball is presented by the organisation Busboys and Poets and is held around the US presidential inauguration to “energise and inspire artists, activists and progressives determined to strengthen our democracy.”
Alongside Angela Davis, past iterations of the event have featured Danny Glover, Alice Walker, Solange, Amy Goodman, Cheryl Strayed, Sonia Sanchez, Naomi Klein, and Eve Ensler.
Davis went on to say:
And if we look back at struggles for justice and equality, we find that there aren’t often propitious moments for those struggles. We’ve always confronted waves of conservatism. And while we cannot create the conditions for the struggles in which we engage, we can bring our determination. We can bring our vision for a better future. And even as we express the deep disappointment – and I’m not going to try to enumerate all of the things about which we are collectively disappointed, but we can’t find ourselves so ensconced in that disappointment that we don’t create the kind of hope that will allow us to move forward and pass legacies to the next generation of people who are struggling.
Davis noted that people must be primed to celebrate the beginning of peace in Gaza – bombed relentlessly by Israel in the last year especially.
She said:
And we do — we do — we do want to join that celebration that Linda Sarsour talked about on the sands of Gaza. We want to be able to look forward to that moment.
Davis observed that this does not mean that the US was going through a particularly easy time, simply that there hope in a movement to ask for a free Palestine.
Now, I guess I should at least mention the fact that the conditions of struggle today are horrendous. And when I try to imagine what it might mean to confront, you know, all of those who are the billionaires, who once were opposed to Trump, who are now offering themselves up to him, but when I think about the move toward fascism, I also celebrate the fact that we have never seen as many people stand up for the freedom of Palestine. People who were dissuaded in the past by Zionist propaganda are standing up and powerfully demanding a free Palestine. Free, free Palestine. And that is what we are celebrating this evening. That is what we are celebrating.
Then, Davis quoted Martin Luther King, who had said, “We should not capitulate to finite disappointments, but believing and work with infinite hope.”
Davis said:
Now, I think it might be propitious — I’ll use that word again — that the inauguration is happening on the same day as we celebrate the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King. And in that context, I want to remind us that it was Dr. King who said that we cannot capitulate to finite disappointments, and what we do is we confront those finite disappointments with infinite hope. And that is what we are in the process of doing.