"I CAN NEVER BE WHAT I OUGHT TO BE until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.”

What Martin Luther King Jr. exactly meant here, spoken five days before his martyrdom, remains a mystery. His words are eschatology as well as ethics. That King’s words still inspire and challenge, thirty-five years after his death, reveal their abiding truth for the American context. His wedding of militant organizing for justice with the philosophy of nonviolence fits well our unfinished situation of racial injustice and pervasive violence. We are again involved in an awful avoidable war. King’s personal ethics were tragically flawed. Nevertheless, his life example is transparent with hope: rejecting negative identity, affirming black identity, relating black destiny to the nonviolent transfiguration of multiracial America, and connecting the mystery of true humanity (hidden in Christ) to the identity of each individual. In a time of extreme negation, when centrifugal forces cripple human personality and society, King’s truth lives.