Martin Luther King Jr. could be America’s most revered political shape, commemorated in statues, celebrations, and street brands around the world. For the fiftieth wedding anniversary of King’s assassination, the man and his activism are as close to public awareness as ever. But despite his stature, the significance of King’s writings and politics thought remains underappreciated.

In To Form a New World, Tommie Shelby and Brandon Terry write how the marginalization of King’s ideas reflects a going to Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Viewpoint of Martin Luther King Jr. intimate, consensus background that renders the civil privileges movement inherently conservative-an work not at radical reform but at ‘living up to’ long lasting ideals laid straight down by the country’s founders. Upon this view, Ruler marshaled lofty rhetoric to help redeem the concepts of universal (white) heroes, but created little original idea. This failure to engage deeply and truthfully with King’s writings allows him to become conscripted into politics projects he would not endorse, including the pernicious type of ‘color blindness’ that insists, amid glaring race-based injustice, that racism has been overcome.

Cornel Western world, Danielle Allen, Martha Nussbaum, Robert Gooding-Williams, and additional authors join Shelby and Terry in careful, critical engagement with King’s understudied writings on labor and welfare privileges, voting privileges, racism, civil disobedience, non-violence, economic inequality, poverty, love, just-war theory, virtue ethics, political theology, imperialism, nationalism, reparations, and public justice. In King’s thrilling and learned function, the authors find an array of compelling problems to some of the most pressing politics dilemmas of our present, and rethink the legacy of this towering figure.