Every year when Dr. King’s birthday rolls around, scholars and intellectuals come out of the woodwork, Black scholars and intellectuals in particular, offering what they believe to be a thoughtful reflection piece that purportedly situates Dr. King’s work within the current state of affairs. Sadly, most of them have all the originality of a third-grade class project. No disrespect to the third graders out there. What I found in my inbox yesterday, as well as what was forwarded to me by colleagues around the country, was no different. From reading these missives two things are clear: 1) very little information is offered of which the average literate person isn’t already aware and 2) based on the content, it is easy to get the impression that few of the writers have actually read any of Dr. King’s works. Again, everyone knows of Dr. King, but I would venture to say relatively few, scholars and intellectuals included, really know what Dr. King stood for, can speak intelligently to matters such as his philosophy of nonviolence, or identify the forces that gave rise to his increasing radicalization starting in the mid-1960s. In order to do that, one must take time to pore over Dr. King’s writings.

Where do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967) and The Trumpet of Conscience (1968) are two of my personal favorites. Where do We Go From Here is especially important for its analytical depth to world problems. Serious students of history and politics have argued that reading Stride Toward Freedom (1958) is essential to understanding the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a point on which I do not quibble. After all, it was during that time that Dr. King was making the connection between the struggle in Montgomery, Alabama, to that in Johannesburg, South Africa. For Dr. King, the fight for freedom, justice, and equality was part of a larger universal struggle. But don’t stop there, read The Measure of a Man (1959). There is no substitute for reading Dr. King’s own words rather than relying on the interpretation of others such as David Garrow who, in his Pulitzer-Prize winning book Bearing the Cross, missed the mark by depicting King as a reluctant leader of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Dr. King was far from reluctant, rather he was conscientious of his surroundings and the dynamics at play within the African American ecumenical community there in Montgomery. The idea of a young upstart newcomer to town taking the lead on such an important endeavor was certain to rub some old established preachers the wrong way. There are other misinterpretations but time and space prevent a full critique of Garrow’s work, a book in which many misguided souls have found themselves enamored. I would encourage those interested in learning about Dr. King to consult the scholarship of Lewis V. Baldwin, Rufus Burrow, Taylor Branch, and Lawrence Reddick, but only after grappling with Dr. King’s words directly.

Many writers are quick to mention the Nobel Peace Prize awarded Dr. King in 1964 but fail to cite that he was Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1963 and the recipient of the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 1957. Then in 1966 he was awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding. That he was honored in countries so disparate in a number of ways speaks not only to his appeal, but to the leadership example he set, both home and abroad. Oh, and what about the Presidential Medal of Freedom that he was posthumously awarded, nearly ten years after his death? Why did it take so long? This is a matter worth exploring. My contention is that as the years passed and Dr. King began to criticize the Johnson administration for its involvement in the Vietnam War, relations between Dr. King and LBJ deteriorated, hence President Johnson wasn’t about to bestow such an honor upon the man who had become the biggest thorn in his side. And then there was Nixon. He wasn’t going to do it either because, well . . . he was Nixon. It wasn’t until President Jimmy Carter, a fellow Georgian, was ushered into the White House on a wave of Black support that King was accorded the honor.

And about the Vietnam War; contrary to popular belief; King’s widely documented speech at Riverside church in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan in 1967 was not the first time he ventured into such heady and controversial territory—a political landscape littered with landmines. Dr. King had made clear his position on the Vietnam War as early as the summer of 1965 during a Southern Christian Leadership Conference Convention in Petersburg, Virginia. In private, his was a popular position among his civil rights comrades, however, when he elected to go public, that is before the national media, even some of his closest associates abandoned him. Undaunted, Dr. King was unwavering in his conviction, believing, rightfully so, that he was on the right side of history, thus setting the kind of example from which all of us can learn. In other words, King was guided by a moral compass that could not be swayed by perks and politics.

What’s more, when folk bring up the Nobel Peace Prize, an honor that required he fly to Norway in order to receive, it is done without context. Specifically, many neglect to underscore the importance of his extensive travel itinerary that included stops in the various Nordic and Scandinavian countries, en route to Oslo. It was during his travels that Dr. King began to flesh out his critique of capitalism and think more deeply about the interrelatedness between capitalism and racism, which led him to begin floating the idea of a Democratic Socialist society, as he believed that such a society was more consistent with Christian ethics. The importance of Dr. King’s travels, which also included trips to Africa and India in the late 1950s cannot be overstated, for they were, as was advocated in the Middle Ages, part of the Grand Tour—the Grand Tour being an essential part of one’s education process.

It was during the early to mid-1960s that Dr. King increasingly began thinking about the federalization of basic industries such as healthcare and other areas with the express purpose of bringing about economic justice and a redistribution of wealth, ideas that some had wishfully hoped would materialize during the Obama administration. Dr. King’s thinking on these matters are as important today as they have ever been. Unfortunately, his dream is as deferred today as it was yesterday, and the year before that and the decade before that and the half century before that.

At a time when racism seems to be surging rather than abating, revisiting Dr. King’s thinking seems a logical thing to do. Dr. King talked about the three evils—poverty, racism, and militarism (in the case of Black people in America, it’s the police). Dr. King maintained that “compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar” (or in the case of many universities across the country, flinging grant money or sending out emails about RFPs and putting the onus on faculty members to dismantle racism), compassion calls for a revolution of values, something to which the majority of Americans do not seem committed. As Dr. King aged, his thinking matured, and he became, in some ways, radical in his worldview. I’d like to think that had he lived; along with poverty, racism, and militarism, he would have also recognized the importance of extracting the country of sexism, a disease that like racism, has stood in the way of America actualizing its full potential. To do so however, he would have had to confront his own chauvinistic thinking on matters such as women in leadership positions.

Be that as it may, if we aren’t going to do the kind of things that Dr. King had hoped we’d do in order to bring about a Beloved Community that is grounded in the New Testament’s agape love, the least we as academics can do is contextualize properly Dr. King’s life for the purposes of informing and enlightening those who are likely never to crack open one of his books.