King gave us the answer. We should listen.

As we look toward Martin Luther King Jr. Day next week, it is worth remembering how uneasy the holiday’s creation was. Although the observance was signed into law by Ronald Reagan in 1983, the adoption was not immediate. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was not fully recognized by all 50 states until 2000, when South Carolina became the last to do so.

To many Americans who were alive in the 1960s, King was not the marble-statue figure we know today. He was an agitator, a disturber of the peace and a man who refused to accept that justice should arrive on a schedule that allowed others to feel comfortable. When told to be patient, he asked, simply and relentlessly, if not now, when? Then years later, when it came time to recognize his contributions to the country, many chose to focus on his human frailties rather than acknowledge an inexorable arc of history.

King’s contribution was to force Americans to confront the gap between the promises made by the American Revolution and the reality that followed. The civil rights movement of the 1960s was not demanding something new so much as collecting on a debt long past due.

That was enough to frighten much of the country, yet history has a way of rearranging reputations. As Malcolm X rejected integration, as Stokely Carmichael turned away from nonviolence and as the Black Panthers literally took up arms, King’s vision of a multiracial democracy bound by shared moral rules began to look, by comparison, almost conservative.

An assassin’s bullet, from whom we still wonder, ended his life while his dream was unfinished.

In the decades since, America has tried, in fits and starts, to advance King’s vision. Affirmative action and, later, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs were born of a well-intended recognition that entrenched inequality does not evaporate on its own. King would agree, but the tools used to advance those goals are, in many ways, contrary to his teachings.

That’s where the irony of the present becomes hard to ignore. King’s moral center was always the idea that human dignity rests in our common humanity. Put simply, he envisioned a country where race no longer determined outcomes.

Many contemporary frameworks, however well-meaning, increasingly ask us to see one another through group identity. They sort, rank and assign moral weight to our differences in direct contradiction to the values of the man whose life we honor next week.

It is not that King would have denied the reality of discrimination. He confronted it head-on. It is that he insisted the destination was a shared civic equality, not a system of competing categories.

In that sense, today’s excesses, like yesterday’s militancy, have made King look more relevant, not less. His vision endures because it asks us to confront injustice without forgetting that we share a single, fragile moment in human history, on a planet small enough, and a lifespan short enough, that division is a luxury we can ill afford.

Perhaps that’s why, after 58 years, many who once resisted the recognition of his accomplishments look at King more favorably now.

They should.

In an age of sharpened divisions and moral sorting, his appeal to a common humanity should not be viewed as a matter of nostalgia, but a reminder that the desired outcome is not to increase the number of protected classes, but that they should be unnecessary in a nation where we are not judged, nor will we be divided by color, religion, disability, private preference or political stripe, but by the content of our character.