Martin Luther King Jr is often remembered for his soaring oratory. But the commonplace emphasis on his rhetoric rather than his ideas too often allows conservatives to domesticate him, or worse, use his taken-out-of-context words to bolster the very forces of oppression that King struggled to defeat.

A new book on King’s political philosophy — To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr, co-edited by Brandon M. Terry and Tommie Shelby — takes seriously King as a thinker, not simply an orator or activist. Daniel Denvir, host of Jacobin Radio‘s The Dig, recently had the chance to speak with the Harvard scholars about King’s rich political philosophy. The following is a condensed and slightly edited version of their conversation.