My route back to the University from downtown would have carried me through several miles of expressway in range of slum high-rises, or my route home passed through several miles of the same, with high-rises closer to the expressway. I chose the latter, to be with family, since we knew that area schools would quickly shutter.

How did we know that the immediate aftermath of the death of this man of peace would include violent acts, burnings, trashings, threats to life, spewings of racial hate--all of which King had worked to end? Some of us had seen the signs of resentment, chafing, mini-rebellion all around us. Our family often attended a church a couple of blocks from where King had set up Chicago shop. Its almost all-black membership treated us as brothers and sisters, and my wife did some Bible School teaching there (even getting her auto confronted and rocked one day, with our five little boys in back. Mild and reconciling (and frightened) as they were, they had told us of the rage that was building up. It spilled over forty years ago today.

Our children had made a hero of Dr. King since seven summers earlier when I was on a five-day program with him at a black preachers summer school in Hampton, Virginia, he had kidded with them and played a bit. They knew that Dad had marched in Selma, however un-bravely he moved, and table talk at our home and in friendship circles always came back to the way Dr. King was helping end segregation and improve the lives of all Americans. We often talked about he was losing support as he began to engage in radical questioning of the Vietnam War. (Picture him now protesting the Iraq adventure!)

I said King was a man between eras: his non-violent approach helped end legal segregation and bring in new freedoms to black Americans and new conscientious endeavors on the part of so many of the rest of the citizens.

Coming at him from the left were the new more militant "Black Power" advocates. Looming on the right were forces of the right, beginning to gather in moves that, typically, helped turn the Democratic (and segregationist) South into the almost solid Republican South. We can debate both aspects of his legacy

Yet so many changes have occurred, so many improvements have come for many blacks and other minorities in his legacy that we can only celebrate the way he could speak to all sides, and often get a hearing.

From my point of view, one of the most impressive, profound, and deft aspects of King's approach was his employment of the scriptures of America's two major religions to further reconciliation and justice. One was the combination of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution for our "public" or "civil" religion; the other was his grounding, thanks to his Baptist roots, in Isaiah and the prophets, Jesus and the gospels, to which he called the eighty percent of the people who claim to be utterly devoted to them. For a while that combination worked, consciences were moved, and, grudgingly, legislation and court decisions followed.

Abraham Lincoln liked to appeal to "the better angels of our nature." King was no angel, as he was the first to confess, but he was a man of learning, courage, and profundity, who knew how to appeal to "the better angels of our nation," who sometimes can be summoned for good causes, and whose presence we would welcome again.