He never pretended to be a saint. He was a great preacher, with a gift for making the larger moral issues clear and simple, but his own life wasn’t clear or simple. Every day Dr. King faced tough ethical and political choices. It took a toll on him, on his marriage to Coretta, on his children; whose father was away for much of their childhood, and then suddenly and violently taken away forever by an assassin’s bullet.

Dr. King wasn’t granted a halo in his lifetime, some pictured him wearing horns. He was reviled for stirring up trouble when he challenged legal segregation in the Montgomery bus boycott. He was hated for calling out white people who had lived complacently in a city that forced Black people to the back of the bus–a daily humiliation for Black people, a daily validation of status for white people. Dr. King upset the balance. He was willing to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.�

After the boycott ended, after the buses were integrated and the world didn’t end, the civil rights movement entered the next phase. Now there was room for more Black people to speak out, and some of them criticized Dr. King. Impatient, questioning nonviolence, even taking up arms. There was infighting, there were people who vented their frustration and rage on their own with accusations of complicity. Some of the older generation who had survived the most nakedly violent oppression were disparaged, as if their experience had nothing to teach the world.

In this phase, Dr. King was pressured by the radical wing of the civil rights movement. At the same time he was attacked in print by some white people who claimed to have been his allies, and seemed to take his opposition to the Vietnam War as a personal affront.

If he were alive today, if he had not been murdered while organizing in support of a sanitation workers strike, he would be a dangerous man. He would be a thorn in the side of racist, greedy, imperialist America. He would be goading us to be the just, democratic and tolerant America that we are when we listen to the angels of our better nature. No one likes the feel of a goad, he would not be thanked for applying it.

The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King was not a saint. He was not guided in his every decision by a heavenly star that shone a light on the right path to take. He had to make his choices as they faced him, sometimes in conflict and anguish. Like all of us, he had to make his choices as best he could and hope they were the right ones. He wasn’t granted the gift of predicting the future, he was only mortal. He wasn’t immune to temptation, he wasn’t always right. But the great inspiration to be found in studying his life is that he was so often right. As time goes on his words ring truer, the sound judgement in his actions stands, he was right about so many things. He was right about our need to confront the past and live up to our stated ideals, and he was right that it is worth the cost. He was right about the terrible cost of doing less.

The murder of Dr. King robbed us of a leader we badly needed, and we are poorer for it. We have his words and example. His life challenges us. He was not exempt from any of the hardships of human nature, and neither are we. He gave all that he had. What can we give to keep the struggle for justice alive?