Martin Luther King Jr was not a popular man. In 1963, just 41 percent of Americans expressed a positive view of him. Only Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was more unpopular. It went downhill from there. By 1966, two-thirds of Americans held a negative view of King. In his remaining years, King polled worse than nearly all other well-known Americans. Worse than Ted Kennedy would after Chappaquiddick. Worse than Haldeman and Ehrlichman would during Watergate. Even French president Charles de Gaulle failed to provoke the same hostility as King.

Now that’s all changed. Why? Some will say it’s because King solved America’s “race problem” through something we call “civil disobedience.”

Yet right up until his assassination on April 4, 1968, King insisted that America’s race problem had not been solved. He also was no mere civil disobedient, at least not as that term is commonly understood. He was not just a man of conscience, ready to break the law but affirm its authority. King was prepared to, and repeatedly did, challenge the authority of the state itself. He did so as an act of resistance against the use of the “rule of law” on behalf of powerful interests. He was less part of an imagined tradition running back through Gandhi and Thoreau than part of a real tradition that runs like a red thread through the labor movement’s radical wing and left-wing politics more generally.