While Martin Luther King, Jr. may now be revered as an important American, this wasn’t the case not so long ago:

The man himself was controversial, notes LaSalle University sociology professor Charles Gallagher. King — bound up with issues of racial and economic inequality that spotlight America’s worst sins — is a “Rorschach test,” Gallagher says, that people see in King what they want to see…

Part of the problem, says Gallagher, ironically lies in the progress of the African-American community since the heyday of the civil rights movement. The black middle class has grown, black culture is more mainstream, and the United States even has a black (or, as some would emphasize, biracial) president now.

“A lot of white America, if you look at the survey data, have come to believe that the goals of the civil rights movement have been achieved,” he said.

And yet it wasn’t so long ago that even the prospect of a Martin Luther King Day engendered protests. The first bill to create a federal holiday failed in 1979; it took corporate activism and a “Happy Birthday” song from Stevie Wonder to raise its public profile. It was signed into law in 1983 and first observed in 1986 — though not every state went along with the idea. A late-’80s move by Arizona to rescind the holiday cost the state the 1993 Super Bowl.

This does not strike me as unusual: historical figures often get reduced to more specific narratives over time. In the United States, there is the sanitary King found in public settings, a man who wanted equality for all and who often is reduced to a few speeches or images. This King succeeded in the eyes of many Americans, raising basic questions about equality and leading to new laws that ended the Jim Crow era.

Then there is the real King, a real person with strengths and weaknesses who said a lot of challenging things. This King had great moments but also many struggles. Reading King’s big speeches, several of which can be found here, and writings is a worthwhile task that I would guess few Americans have undertaken. These words are still challenging today as we face questions about race and ethnicity, discrimination, and inequality. Additionally, King’s Christian foundation is a challenge in a nation where Christians are the largest religious group and might prefer to debate Tim Tebow’s outspokenness about his faith than consider the bigger problems we face.