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Among the many reasons that Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy matters is because it refuses cynicism and moral fatigue

Jan. 19 marks Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a day to commemorate King’s life and an opportunity to revisit his political practice. In this current moment when crises intersect—as economic inequality widens, housing and healthcare insecurity grows and geopolitical uncertainties strengthen—many of us experience a quieter crisis of moral fatigue. The scale of what is wrong can numb our attention.

One of the many reasons King’s legacy matters is because it refuses cynicism. Fifty-eight years after his death, we are faced with the same question as he: How do we turn “this fatigue of despair into buoyancy of hope,” to use the preacher’s own phrase? In an era saturated with calls to save the world through individual moral ambition, King's approach may offer better and more productive alternatives by inviting a shared reflection on moral fatigue across societies, from the United States to India.��

Anshul Rai Sharma is a PhD student in the ���������� Boulder Department of Geography.

As a national leader, King was always alert to that which people share beneath their divisions. In his speeches, he always articulated a common humanity: "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny." This network of mutuality made him see social divisions as unnatural and morally indefensible.

As a young man, his train journey from Atlanta to Connecticut allowed him to witness how Black people sat separate from whites up to the Mason-Dixon line. But north of it, that barrier disappeared, revealing the arbitrariness of racial divisions and setting him on a lifelong path toward reconciliation. If, as W.E.B. Du Bois famously observed, the problem of the century was the problem of the color line, King's response was to wage a struggle against this separation through nonviolence.

In doing so, King was informed by an amalgam of influences, from Gandhi’s philosophy and practice of nonviolence to Walter Rauschenbusch’s social gospel. King wrestled with each philosophical idea and method as he exercised his own conscience. Added to this was his experience in organizing—from Montgomery’s bus boycott to the Poor People’s Campaign in Chicago, each, in its way, shaping and expanding King’s conception of humanity. The result was a moral geography without borders—one that may offer a way out of fatigue.

King’s life and practice

Throughout his life, King presented groups with moral demands attuned to their social position. From African Americans, he demanded nonviolent discipline in protest, a rigorous collective practice capable of transforming suffering into political force. From northern white liberals, he asked for more than verbal agreement with racial equality. As he put it, “It is one thing to agree with the goal of integration legally; it is another to commit oneself positively and actively to the ideal of integration.” From Southern white moderates, he demanded courage to overcome fear, to break with social consensus and to persuade others.

I read this strategy, unique to King, as a widening of moral responsibility. To separate morality from social life was, in his view, to empty it of force.

Similarly, individual ethical commitments that remained confined to belief, civility or legal agreement were insufficient because they left unjust structures intact. Instead of placing morality above or apart from social relations, King embedded it within them.

The result was a slow and gradual forging of solidarities, which transcended religious and class divisions. The Montgomery bus boycott, for instance, brought together Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians and Episcopalians. Though some clergy at times resisted King’s call to address social realities—instead suggesting that such matters be left to courts—King reminded them that��“[a]ny religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.”��In doing so, King redefined the church’s role as a moral actor accountable to the material conditions of people’s lives.

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During his 1959 visit to India, Martin Luther King Jr. was introduced at a public gathering as a fellow “untouchable." He was featured on a stamp in India in 1969. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

His moral appeal transcended class divisions as physicians, teachers and lawyers stood alongside domestic workers and laborers in marches, united by King's vision of common life. Thus, social uplift became a shared undertaking in which no group stood outside responsibility. By grounding ethics in social struggle, King laid the foundation for a politics aimed at social reform.

‘I am an untouchable’

Social reform, in any credible sense, must begin from the lived realities of those most affected by injustice and confront the structures that sustain inequality. Not only did King’s philosophy align with Gandhi’s non-violence, it was also informed by a deep encounter with caste as a form of structural oppression.

During his 1959 visit to India, King was introduced at a public gathering as a fellow “untouchable,” a term then used to describe Dalits, those placed at the bottom of caste hierarchy and historically subjected to extreme social exclusion. Initially taken aback by the comparison, King reflected on its meaning: “Yes,” he said, “I am an untouchable, and every Negro in the United States of America is an untouchable.” He recognized the shared condition of social degradation produced by social systems. Such systems were deemed moral evils that demanded organized dismantling. Speaking of race and caste, he continued, “We have a moral mandate to get rid of this evil system.”

In this respect, King’s project of racial integration and equality resonates intimately with that of��Dr.��B.R. Ambedkar, the early-20th-century Dalit intellectual and political leader and principal architect of modern India’s constitution. Born into an “untouchable” caste, Ambedkar argued that political freedom without social reform was hollow and that democracy in independent India could not survive unless caste was dismantled at its roots.��

While King is most often read alongside��Gandhi, more enduring intellectual and strategic affinities lie with Ambedkar.�� Both leaders share historic trajectories, where King, the son of a Black preacher, rose to become a national leader of the U.S. Civil Rights movement; and Ambedkar, born into a Dalit family, became India’s foremost leader of the oppressed castes.�� These parallel lives help us see how both thinkers understood social oppression as systemic and placed social reform at the center of a nation’s political life. In 2017,��Martin Luther King III, during a visit to India, emphasized the shared legacy of King and Ambedkar.

Moral ambition in contemporary times

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Martin Luther King Jr. was intimately aware of how working people and the poor possess moral agency even when systems limit their options, and he campaigned to make people see this for themselves. This recognition is the beginning of self-respect, notes ���������� Boulder scholar Anshul Rai Sharma. (Photo: U.S. Information Agency Press and Publications Service)

It is against this background that contemporary articulations of morality appear inadequate. Recent calls for ethical renewal often focus on individual responsibility while leaving social relations largely unexamined. Consider Dutch author Rutger Bregman's 2025 book Moral Ambition, which asks people to dedicate their time to improving the world—yet his framework reveals assumptions that, while indicative of our times, need to be reviewed.

Bregman argues that scientists, doctors, entrepreneurs, engineers and lawyers must become "morally ambitious" and that this is the pathway to solving the world’s most pressing issues. But his framework dismisses ordinary people, describing them as "herd animals" who "do what we're taught to do, accept what we're handed, believe what we're told is true."

Where King recognized the masses as capable of spiritual awakening, Bergman’s articulation of morality strips them of agency, seeing ordinary people as passive followers "sticking to the script that goes with our kind of life."

In thinking about this notion of moral ambition, it is important to remember that modern life still divides labor between activities that are or may seem as menial and routine and those that are seen as creative and ideal. A major portion of working people, especially caste minorities in the Global South and racial minorities in the United States, fall into the former category. To label such populations as "herds" or suggest they lack moral ambition refuses genuine engagement with the actual forces that shape people's lives, forces deeply felt and understood by both Ambedkar and King.

A portion of King’s enduring appeal lies in this recognition. Ordinary people face real economic and social constraints that shape their choices. These may include the struggle to make rent, raise children, navigate discrimination and survive without reliable state support.��King was intimately aware of how working people and the poor possess moral agency even when systems limit their options, and he campaigned to make people see this for themselves. This recognition is the beginning of self-respect.

In his sermons and speeches, he spoke to the part of our being which is a gift, our ability to live dignified lives despite and against inequalities and oppressive structures. Through King’s words, people could see the constraints but also the real meaning of their lives, encouraging them to organize and to act. From Washington to Mumbai, from university halls to churches, this was the transformation that the preacher from Atlanta sought.

This is King's enduring gift, a moral framework that refuses to separate the personal from the social, that sees ordinary people as agents and that understands justice as something we create together rather than await from authorities or technocratic experts. As we face our own moment of moral fatigue, perhaps the question we should ask ourselves is not how to become more “morally ambitious” but how to bring home and amplify the latent moral energies that do not promise rapid or universal solutions, but that remain the quiet foundation of how communities endure, resist and remake the world.

Anshul Rai Sharma is a PhD student in the Department of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research focuses on caste, urban dispossession and housing in the city of Bengaluru, India.

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