Edgar E. Robinson Professor in United States History I am just old enough to remember Dr. King, but my appreciation of him developed in graduate school, thanks to one of my Stanford teachers, Clayborne Carson. Clay introduced me to a more complex, challenging figure than the one comfortably ensconced in the nation’s collective memory. Everyone today quotes the “I have a dream” speech, but what do we know of the King who risked his political career to condemn the war in Vietnam, who declared that every bomb dropped overseas exploded in an American city, who asked what good it was to sit at a lunch counter if one couldn’t afford a hamburger, who marched in Chicago for fair housing and came to Memphis, where he died, to support striking garbagemen?