Read more of Kim Lawton's interview with Rev. Cheryl Sanders, professor of Christian ethics at Howard University School of Divinity:

Q: It's been 40 years since Dr. King was killed. What are some of the things you are thinking about in looking back at that and his impact on your life?

A: The 40 years is kind of stunning, because that says that there are many young adults who were born since that time, and it's more than a generation ago that he was assassinated. I think about the fact that here in the city of Washington one of the lasting memories of the death of Dr. King was the eruption of the cities and the rioting, and in some cases, here in Washington especially, they're just now revitalizing those areas 40 years later. That's one of the most stunning things, the way that nation responded. This was a man who was all about peace and nonviolence, and when he was brutally assassinated, there was a brutal response all over the United States, and that's the lingering sentiment. However, the protest movement, nonviolent protest, continued from that time, and even to this day a march or a protest or a candlelight vigil remains an important way in the community to express outrage or concern, and so I think that there's a strong lingering effect of his legacy, even in the lives of people who were born years after his death.

Q: What about for you in your ministry? Do you still feel a direct connection with what he did and how that affects your ministry?

A: I think so. I think it's unavoidable. I think it's unavoidable, because Martin Luther King remains the drum major for justice. And so one of the things that often gets said about the black church: "Oh, the black church is silent on this. The black church is silent on that. Where's the black church? Where's the voice?" But Martin Luther King really set the standard for prophetic ministry in these United States. By prophetic ministry I mean a person who's going to speak out on behalf of the oppressed, whether it's the issue of race or class. He remains the spokesperson, I mean the high water mark of social justice ministry not just for the black church but for these United States. Of course, it was a different time. He was in the '60s, which was a time of great change and transition, and there were all different kinds of styles of protest. But he sort of maintained a certain demeanor of honoring the ministry and the Bible and the tradition of faith in Jesus Christ, but also taking on these issues without resorting to electoral politics as the ultimate solution. It's a different approach, and I think that legacy remains very important to me. It remains like a standard. If you're going to do ministry outside of the four walls of the church, we still have as our most important role model Martin Luther King.

Q: To what extent do you see that legacy still being worked out in the community?

A: I think, for me, there are two ways the legacy is working out. There are persons who marched with Martin Luther King, ministers especially, who are still alive and still very active. The soldiers of the civil rights movement are still among us. Among the most prominent of those voices would be the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who is still a gadfly for social justice on a whole host of issues. So that legacy continues -- some of those persons, like John Lewis, who was elected to the Congress. There are others who carry on that work. Even Marian Wright Edelman whose work in the Children's Defense Fund is a further iteration of concern for the poor and the oppressed. But there's another sense in which I think the legacy continues. And that is, as I've said before in some thinking and speaking that I've done in the past year, the prophetic mantle of King did not fall on one person. It fell on a community, and that community I like to think of as the prophetic community. It's the church coming to voice, the community coming to voice, a mass movement of people who are coming to voice around these issues but with the intention of being progressive and being peaceful and making positive contributions to the quality of life for everyone. And so that, for me, is the part of his legacy that I want to be working on and contributing to.

Q: So rather than one person who stepped into his shoes you see it as being much broader than that?

A: It's got to be much broader than that. I'm always inspired on the King holidays. Sometimes I've spent those King holidays in schools and the little children, you know, who give their recitations about Martin Luther King. I think it's important to keep that legacy alive. Not just looking for one person to be the reincarnation of King but what do we do as a community to honor his legacy other than have a holiday and run a glossy ad in a magazine? Because a lot of corporate America has embraced the legacy of King in terms of advertising, but who is actually implementing the things that he spoke about and the things that he dreamed of?

Q: To what extent do you worry that the further away from Dr. King we get the more that legacy gets a little blurrier or people don't truly understand him?

A: I as an ethicist, as a religion scholar, am very concerned that people seem not always to maintain a focus on his academic background. He had a Ph.D. in theology. He studied the problem before he ever became a pastor. The problems that even in his first book, STRIDE TOWARD FREEDOM, which is the story of the Montgomery bus boycott -- he's the new kid on the block. He's still finishing his dissertation. He has an opportunity, an invitation, a call to pastor a church, and as soon as he gets established in that pulpit, here's this protest movement that lasts a whole year, the Montgomery bus boycott, but successfully after a year's time -- Rosa Parks, of course, didn't give up her seat, and she was arrested, and months later the laws were changed, and so he was just kind of cast in this role of leadership, largely because he was new. But it wasn't all just serendipitous. I mean, he had studied that problem. The whole issue of the public theologian was finding formation in his life as he went along, and a lot of people have no appreciation for him as a thinker and as a writer. I think that, as an academician myself, that's one assignment that I have -- to make sure that my students, now my students are theological students, but that I do everything I can to preserve his legacy of thought and reflection and putting those ideas into practice, which is what he did, and drawing from a broad range of thinkers. He was aware of Gandhi in India. He was aware of the Niebuhrs and the contribution they made to theology in America, particularly in the early 20th century, and Tillich and Barth and so many theologians either from Europe or from North America. He brought all of those things together in his thinking -- Howard Thurman in the black tradition -- and made sense of that and implemented it and communicated it very effectively to people who didn't have the academic background or people who wouldn't pick up those books and read them. But he sort of distilled those ideas into terms that made sense and interpreted the experience of suffering in terms that made sense for them religiously and for people who were not Christians. It still made sense just as human rights issues.

Q: Some people have mentioned to me that they're afraid King has in some ways been "domesticated" over the years, that the more prophetic edge he had or the more radical side of him has been blunted, so all people think about is "I have a dream." Do you share that concern?

A: I share that concern. The "I Have a Dream" speech is arguably the most prominent sound-bite that gives people who otherwise would not know a sense of what black prophetic preaching has been. When King got to that riff, "I have a dream," he had already established the analysis of the problem of racism and oppression, and so you can take the dream and separate that -- if you don't hear the whole speech, it's like, oh well, he's just dreaming. I think it's really important to recognize that that analysis of the problem of racism and segregation and oppression and the demand that -- I mean, this was a protest march on the Mall of the capital of the United States. I mean, it wasn't like, oh, I just have a dream, and it's a nice dream that everybody can just sort of join in and hold hands. Well, there was some of that language in there, but the important language is a call to accountability, calling America to account. He had nicer words for it than some other people have had. But it's still a call to accountability, and that has to be retained, because that analysis is still incomplete. It's still undone. I think it is important to connect the dream. The vision is great and important, but the vision is grounded in an analysis of the reality, and that reality is still with us. It's not 40 years -- there's been a lot of progress, but some things are the same.

Q: And what parts of that dream are still unfinished or unfulfilled?

A: I think the basic fact -- one of the most important things that King dreamed about and spoke about in that speech was that he looked forward to the day when his children, his black children, would not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. That dream remains to be fulfilled in our society, because there are still people who are judged or who will judge me, my children, by the color of our skin and not by the content of our character. We won't even get a chance to manifest character because we already get judged or pre-judged. We don't use that word a lot anymore: prejudice. That means that you just make assumptions about people based on their color or their nationality or their sex and without giving them a chance to be people. And I think that for me it -- even for people of all races, we have a tendency to pigeonhole people based on the external characteristics. And one of the things that has happened in the past 40 years -- look at all the advances in human genomic research. And we know about DNA and the human genome that we didn't know 40 years ago, and what that research tells us is essentially we're the same. I mean, the things that make us different are so insignificant. Yet a marker like skin color or hair or color of eyes becomes a way to judge people. So we still have to be healed of that, and that's still prevalent, whether it's African Americans or Spanish-speaking persons or people who have immigrated to this country from other places. We still have a way of categorizing people based on the externals and not based on their character. So that still remains undone, and it's still a challenge.

Q: I've interviewed a young minister who was not even alive when King died and who has very liberal politics and very much an "in the streets" kind of a ministry, and he sees himself as continuing the legacy of Dr. King, and I've interviewed an African American megachurch minister who has emphasized much more social conservative issues, although he still talks about issues like economic development and racism as well and very much sees himself as furthering the legacy of Dr. King, too. To what extent has Dr. King become a touchstone for many different streams within the African American community?

A: It's important. I think touchstone is a correct way of characterizing his legacy [and] is so important for us in the United States because of the holiday and because, you know, his voice is recognizable 40 years later. His face is recognizable -- largely what we've done in schools, from elementary through college, to keep the knowledge and the memory of him alive. He becomes an important touchstone. But what happens is his legacy gets misappropriated, I think. Economic development is certainly from the -- King didn't discover the poor the last year of his life. I mean, he was advocating for the poor from the very beginning. It just happens that the poor and the black people and the poor people are largely the same people in the constituencies where he was beginning in Montgomery and other places. Dr. King did have a very specific view of the problem of racism in America. But he didn't use the same kind of language as his contemporary, Malcolm X. And Malcolm X was, you know, he's a radical and he's full of hate and he's a Muslim. I mean, he was just denigrated. But they said a lot of the same things. They just didn't say it the same way, didn't use the same words. And as Malcolm was growing in his understanding and being transformed in his understanding of the problem of race based on his exposure to Islam as a global religion, we saw -- you could even make a case there was a convergence of vision. But with Martin Luther King, as a Christian, he sort of represented the Christian Church and the Baptist Church in a certain kind of way, a certain kind of language. And it sort of lent itself to people who have all kinds of different political views can find something in his legacy that they can honor, if nothing else, the dream. And the dream looks forward, and that's great. But we can't afford to overlook the problem out of which the dream emerged. And I think that's problematic for some of the politically conservative people who, it seems to me -- a black conservative to me is an oxymoron, because conservative means that you're trying to hold onto the past and to honor the past, and some of our past as African Americans we really don't want to hold onto that. We don't want to preserve that. We want to be progressive. And so King in his day he didn't have much involvement in electoral politics, because he was maintaining, I think very successfully, his independence as a prophetic voice, and that landscape has changed.

Q: How much conversation is there within the black community about where the legacy should go today in a different time?

A: Well, at least on the holiday every January, that Monday holiday, many churches have sermons, and there are ecumenical services. I've participated in many of them not only in Washington D.C. but other areas of the country. On college campuses, if no other time, the King birthday holiday gives people an opportunity to reflect. It sort of forces the issue of reflecting on the legacy, and in the public sector, of course, you have services, and if not worship services you'll have programs that will recall that legacy. So it's going to remain important at least once a year. The challenge is once you've had the observance, or the worship, or the singing, or the concert, to stay attuned to the problem of implementation. How do we continue to implement the analysis of the problem, to implement solutions that will work and that will have an impact, will make a difference?

Q: You were saying different people find things in the dream to appropriate. Talk more about that.

A: I think what happens is that people, they sort of play on the popularity and the recognizability of Martin Luther King's image. He has a certain image. He has, really, an iconic status in the United States. So you can easily say, "Well, Dr. King would've done this" or "What would Dr. King have said?" and "Dr. King would've supported this." It's sort of like, "What would Jesus do? Well, Jesus would've done this, and Jesus would've done that," without really looking at what did Jesus actually do? But we can look at what Dr. King actually did, and that was hard work, and the dream was just sort of a call to vision. But the call to vision emerges out of a very difficult conundrum of racism and discrimination and unfairness and unjustice that can be corrected and addressed, and so that's still there. But you don't want to distill the dream from the reality that the problem is still lingering. I think we're in denial in the United States when we say, if we try to say, well, there isn't a problem of race. Or we shouldn't bring up, we shouldn't play the race card. You shouldn't bring up race. Well, race is still a problem as long as people get judged by their skin color and not by their character.

Q: People appropriate different parts of the vision to further their own --

A: So during the month of January you can pick up any magazine, and you'll see ads celebrating the dream of Martin Luther King from all kinds of corporations. And, like, that's not evil in and of itself. But they don't necessarily, in celebrating his dream they don't necessarily commit themselves to the legacy of struggle and the prophetic voice, the critique of America and the broadening of that critique beyond the United States to a global perspective that involves peace and the impact of the affluence of America upon the living conditions of people all over the world. That globalization of King's perspective was seen somehow as something kind of radical and different. But in my view, he had that global perspective from the beginning. His last book, entitled WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE: CHAOS OR COMMUNITY?, was very prophetic in his ability to analyze how all of these things are interconnected, and his vision was also of a beloved community where everybody would be at peace, and people would get along, and there would be love. But it wasn't just a pipe dream. It was something that could be achieved by increasing our quality of relationship and really being committed to the ministry of reconciliation so that when there's been an injury done, you don't deny it. You acknowledge it and then move on. And very often in this country we don't want to acknowledge it. We just want to move on, just forget about that. But if we forget about the things that happened in the past without acknowledging them, then what prevents us from getting into that same situation in the future? We can't just kiss and make up. We have to deal with it. You don't dwell in the past, but you can't ignore it either. I think [Martin Luther King Jr.] had a wonderful balance of a knowledge of the past, acknowledging the past, but also a vision of what the future would look like, and I think largely in the 40 years we have seen the implementation a lot of places in society. You can see that the things he dreamed about actually came to pass, and that's what makes the difference between a true prophet and a false prophet. What the true prophet speaks comes to pass, and much of what Martin Luther King spoke of has come to pass. It's just that the full vision has yet to be completed, and that's work.