The words are the thing.

The extraordinary conjunction of sound and meaning that touches the heart and sears the mind. In relocating the power of the pulpit from the church to the streets—most famously in the 1963 March on Washington—aware of but not beholden to the microphones and cameras that carried his message far beyond, it felt indeed as if his life were on the line. I still carry in my pocket a key tag from the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, a Proustian madeleine to remind my hand what we are still fighting for, what cannot be silenced.

As with Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR and JFK, his speeches were those of a king of words. In celebrating the life of Martin Luther King Jr., we have put him in a pantheon of rarified Mondays, holidays no longer particularly holy though we gladly accept the day off.

Sure, we recall his Memphis “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” final speech, and his sundering “I Have a Dream” prose-poetry looking out across the Washington Mall at those multitudes who had marched there for civil rights.

These twin masterpieces of oratory reverberate down history the way the 271 words of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address do. But we are on train to forgetting much of what else Dr. King did and said. Not many remember that he fought for economic as well as racial justice, and that he went to Memphis on that ill-fated day fifty years ago to stand with striking African American sanitation workers seeking to join a union local.

One might wonder if his own all-too-human flaws might never have survived the intrusive dissections of the private lives of public figures today — most of them, anyway. When it came to marital vows, he was no angel, just as JFK was not. In today’s media environment, the dirt that J. Edgar Hoover trafficked in — particularly after Dr. King came out against the war in Vietnam in 1967 — might have done in his career before a Remington .30-06 in the hands of a George Wallace supporter took his life. It was a tragic illustration that a politician’s racist words can incite men to violence and murder, just as Dr. King’s words moved men towards peace.

After Gary Hart — witness last year’s film “The Front Runner” on his self-immolation — you might have thought that a politician could no longer survive an examined life. But you’d be wrong, of course. We could not have predicted the new American melting pot, in which a quicksand of words and memes consumes some while leaving the rants and peccadilloes of others unscathed.

A few short years ago, with a black First Family, media pundits did not foresee the emergence from the shadows of our psyches and the fringes of our uncivil war an undead strain of racism wrapped in a flag of xenophobia. The skeletons still rattle. 

If we turn a blind eye to the persistence of poverty and inequality, we disregard the legacy of an economy built on slavery and ignore its reverberations that have persisted through history. Visit a Boston school today and you will see de-facto reverse segregation, with whites mostly fled to parochial schools — hard to imagine from the steps of Little Rock High School in 1957.

Back when Dr. King peered at the mountain and willed us on to the other side, few would have believed that in the 21st century the mountain would still not be in the rearview mirror. 

Shame on us if we remember the man but disregard the meaning. Perhaps we need to go back to the source and start again, to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on the way to Montgomery on that Bloody Sunday in 1965, marching once more toward a brighter future, not just for a people but for an entire country of immigrants.

We were not all stolen from our homelands, but many of our ancestors were fleeing what was behind them and flocking to a torch of liberty and equality. It was a torch that burned bright in the mind’s eye of Dr. King, but that had guttered out in an America whose equality was in name only — and that separate.

A year before his death, Dr. King warned at Stanford University of a parallel America with “a daily ugliness about it that constantly transforms the ebullience of hope into the fatigue of despair.” He never gave in to that despair. On more than one occasion, as he did in Selma in 1965, Dr. King quoted abolitionist minister Theodore Parker, reminding us that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

On the day we recalled Dr. King’s courage and sacrifice, let’s remember when we reach a bend in an arcing road to take it. We march on.

Dalton Delan is an accomplished American writer, editor, television producer and documentary filmmaker. His column is copyrighted by Berkshire Writers Group.