When people contemplate Martin Luther King Jr.’s message to the world today, they recall the uplifting and inspired words of his most famous speeches, says Bishop William J. Barber II. But often lost in these reflections are the painful realities that the civil rights leader confronted in his own time, the horrific injustices he faced, and the difficulty of his work.
Those who want to honor King in the 21st century should refrain from “celebrating” him, Barber says. Instead, they should commit themselves to the work that remains unfinished nearly six decades after his death.
“When someone has been a prophetic voice, has challenged injustices, you don’t so much celebrate them as you recommit yourselves to the things that they stood for,” said Barber, a moral movement leader who is founder and director of Repairers of the Breach, which trains social justice leaders, and founding director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School. “You pick up the baton of the unfinished work, and you carry it the next mile.”
Barber, who is also a professor in the practice of public theology and public policy at the Divinity School, will discuss King’s legacy, and the unfinished struggle for a more just world, during Yale’s annual MLK Commemoration event on Jan. 27. The title of his talk is “More than a Sermon: Martin’s Last Message to Us Now.”
Members of the Yale and Greater New Haven communities are invited to the event, which will begin at 6 p.m. in Battell Chapel (400 College St.) on Jan. 27. Doors open at 5:15 p.m. The event is free, but registration is required.
In an interview, Barber discussed King’s legacy as a moral leader, his vision for a grassroots movement of “moral fusion politics” that crosses ethnic and racial lines, and how the Yale center, along with partners across the country, is tackling the pernicious challenges of inequity, racism, and poverty.
Your talk on January 27 is titled “Martin’s Last Message to Us Now.” Without giving away too much, what do think Dr. King would want us to focus on today?
Bishop William Barber: One of the challenges we have in terms of how we remember Dr. King is that we often put him in one particular framework. Sometimes we want to remember the last part of one speech, which we know as the “I have a dream” speech, but the title of the speech, which he delivered during the March on Washington, was “Normalcy, Never Again.”
When all we hear is the “I have a dream” part of that speech, we don’t deal with when he said that we refuse to believe that the bank of justice has “insufficient funds.” We don’t deal with the fact that in that same year, Dr. King had been locked up during a campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, where even children were being placed in jail, where water hoses were aimed at people, where dogs were loosed on them. We don’t deal with the fact that it was the same year that [Alabama Governor] George Wallace said “Segregation yesterday, today, and tomorrow.” Or that just about 17 days after the March on Washington, four girls were killed in a Birmingham church. And that by November, you would have the death of a president. So it was a tough year where people, even politicians at the highest level, openly expressed vitriolic racism and a spirit of destruction and death.
So I want to say, let’s try to not to celebrate Dr. King so much because Dr. King told us not to do that. He said, “Don’t talk about the awards that I’ve received. Just say that I tried to be a drum major for justice.”
When someone has been a prophetic voice, has challenged injustices, you don’t so much celebrate them as you recommit yourselves to the things that they stood for. And you pick up the baton of the unfinished work, and you carry it the next mile.

Martin Luther King speaks at a press conference at the U.S. Capitol about the Senate debate on the Civil Rights Act of 1964
In your work you build bridges between theology and policy through moral movements. Can you talk about Dr. King as a model of this kind of leadership?
Barber: People forget that in some ways Dr. King built a movement like you write a Ph.D. dissertation. He studied deeply. In fact, in one of his principles of nonviolent engagement, he said that you don’t just go out and start marching and sitting in. You have to deeply understand and study your adversary and where they’re coming from.
You know, Dr. King was a true constitutionalist. One time he said, “I wouldn’t be doing some of the things I’m doing if I was in some other place. But America, you said this on paper: that the goal of the government is to establish justice and provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare. So we’re going to question policies that don’t do that.”
But he also recognized that you have to build a community of people from the bottom-up. He understood that it’s not about somebody helicoptering in. You know, 250,000 people came to Washington, D.C. for the March on Washington. It wasn’t because he said, “Come here and listen to a sermon.” It came out of deep, deep organizing among impacted people, among moral leaders. And Dr. King recognized, as he said one time, “a law can’t make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me.” So he very much recognized that in our country, we have to push political leaders to promote policy shifts.
Can you talk about what it takes to merge the work of public theology and public policy and how the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy is meeting this challenge?
Barber: At the center we’re attempting to raise up a generation of public theologians. And not just in the tradition of Dr. King, but in many different traditions: the tradition of Dr. King; the tradition of [theologian and ethicist] Reinhold Niebuhr, who studied here at Yale; the tradition of [civil rights leader] Fannie Lou Hamer; the tradition of [social activist] Dorothy Day; the traditions of William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. These were people who came from different traditions but decided to be engaged from a theological perspective. And that theology was not just private religion but looked deeply at the fact that biblical text — particularly in Christian faith, but also in other faiths — calls us to be concerned about “the least of these,” to put justice and love and mercy at the center of our public life and our public discourse and our public engagement.
We take the great mission of our Constitution and great moral call of scripture and lay it like a grid upon a piece of public policy, and we ask the question, as Dr. King and others did: Does this policy represent love? Does it represent equal protection under the law? Does it establish justice? Does it provide for the common defense? Does it line up with what we say?
We have certain laws in place against discrimination, but we still have violations of those laws.
We live in a society where on one hand we have the 15th amendment that says nobody can abridge or deny the right to vote, but where the Voting Rights Act has been gutted. The 14th amendment of our Constitution guarantees equal protection under the law for all persons — not all citizens, but all persons — and yet we have talk of massive deportations of people rather than fixing the immigration system. Our Constitution says that we are supposed to provide for the common defense and general welfare, but we live in the only one of the world’s 25 wealthiest countries that says health care is not a right.
There is also the reality that 43% of our people are living in poverty, 51% of our children living in poverty; there are 140 million people in this nation who are poor or low-wage earners; 800 people die every day from the effects of poverty, according to a study released two years ago. It would take you 2 ½ years to go to all the funerals of the people who die just today. And this poverty is caused by policy, not laziness. We know that 60% of Black people are poor or low wage, which is about 26 million people, but 30% of white people are poor and low wage, which is 66 million people.
Yes, a lot of good things have happened. But we have contradictions that we still have to address… The question Dr. King would raise, and that I’ll be raising at this gathering, is if you say you want to celebrate Dr. King, and if you recognize him as an American treasure, and you believe he was speaking the truth, then how do you deal with his truth in the light of our truths, our reality?
In your book “White Poverty” you call for a grassroots movement of “moral fusion politics” that crosses ethnic and racial lines to tackle the problem. What will it take for that to take root in today’s complex, fragmented society?
Barber: Well, it’s something that we’ve been working on — not just writing about it. In fact, in North Carolina we’ve proved that you can do it through what is called a “moral movement.” But you’ve got to work hard at it. And we came up with what’s called 14 points of moral fusion organizing. The first thing you have to recognize is something Dr. King called the “inextricable connection” that binds all of us. And you build a movement around the deepest moral values that bind us, not around political parties, left-versus-right. A moral movement will engage in politics, but it doesn’t do it from a partisan standpoint. And then you have to build indigenously led movements, state by state, and then bring in all people.
One of the things we need to destroy in this country is the myth that we are often taught about poverty — that poverty is only a Black issue, that it mainly impacts Black or brown people. No. We need to tell the truth so that people see that to address poverty is to address the totality of the American population. And we need to be talking about abolishing poverty; as my friend Matthew Desmond at Princeton says. It’s not just about addressing it a little bit.
Your work takes you all over the country. Are there any efforts — policy advances, partnership, innovative strategies — that give you hope?
Barber: Well, I see hope in the Poor People’s Campaign, a National Call for Moral Revival, and other groups. I have hope when I see a young woman named Pam Garrison, a coal miner’s daughter out of West Virginia, and another woman named Callie Greer, a Black woman and low-wage worker who has lost two children in Alabama where Medicaid expansion was not accepted, working together. When I see these coordinated campaigns — over 40 of them across the country — of poor, low-wage people, it gives me hope.
I also see hope in the work that we do at the center, where we put impacted people, religious leaders, policy leaders, and advocates in the same room. Every class we’ve offered has been full: young people who are going to be ministers, who are going to lead congregations, who will be or are already involved in politics in various areas.
Ultimately what we have to do — and it’s something that I’m deeply committed to — is to train thousands of people who will embrace the need for a Third Reconstruction. From 1865 to about 1890 we had a first Reconstruction, which was designed to bring Blacks and whites together to rebuild the South and they did until it was torn down by the so-called “redemption” movement. Then from 1954 to 1968 we had a second Reconstruction, which ended when Martin was killed and Robert Kennedy was killed. During those years they were able to get the Voting Rights Act, Medicaid, Medicare, further desegregation. But the movement was fought vehemently by those who wanted to maintain the status quo, so it ended without finishing all this work.
History tells us that a movement is necessary in order for people to become more politically active, and I think that we need a Third Reconstruction in this country made up of people of every race, creed, and color—made up of people from every geographical area and state. It could fundamentally shift what is happening in this country. If we are serious about our love of Dr. King and other devotees of the civil rights movement — from Pauli Murray to James Reed [a white Unitarian] and Rabbi [Abraham Joshua] Heschel — we must embrace a Third Reconstruction and finish the work they were doing. We just have to remain steadfast and recognize you don’t build a tower overnight.