And Then What….

Revisiting the Insights of a Professor, Civil Rights Leader, Journalist,

and Friend of MLK Jr.

On the occasion of Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2004, I had the privilege of interviewing and hosting Roger Wilkins[i], now with the Lord, who shared not as a distant commentator but as a man who knew Dr. King well and who, with sobriety and affection, tried to “draw some lessons” from King’s life appropriate for us today.

Today, on MLK Day 2026, I publish online, for the first time, excerpts from that interview/ presentation over two decades ago.

Why now?

Because the temptation Wilkins identified in 2004 has only intensified. He warned us against narrowing Dr. King—reducing him to an annual loop of one famous speech, treating him as little more than a gifted orator. Wilkins insisted that King was, instead, an intellectual—a reader, a writer, a thinker, a man formed by ideas and disciplined labor at a desk as much as by marches in the streets. And Wilkins testified that King was the bravest human being he had ever known—not because he felt no fear, but because he understood the threats were real and still did what he must do anyway.

That distinction matters more in 2026 than it did in 2004, because our age is adept at turning human beings into symbols and slogans—useful for causes, weaponized for tribes, emptied of moral weight, and then deployed against neighbors. Wilkins would not let us do that with King. He pressed us to recover a fuller man: a man of deep mind, deep courage, and deep action.

But Wilkins’s most searching theme was not biographical. It was moral—indeed, almost prophetic in its directness: “With good fortune in this world comes responsibility.” King, Wilkins argued, could have chosen prestige, security, and inheritance—he had every prospect of a protected life. Instead, King asked the question that haunts all privilege: “And then what?” Wilkins applied it to his audience with piercing clarity—especially to those of us with educations, credentials, and public influence: what will we do with the advantages entrusted to us?

That question lands with special force today.

Two decades later, we live amid fresh evidence of what happens when responsibility collapses into entitlement; when influence detaches from moral duty; when the strong curate comfort while the vulnerable become abstractions; when power learns to speak the language of justice but not to practice the habits of decency. Wilkins’s message is more relevant because the pressures he named—self-protection, reputation-management, cynicism, and the reduction of persons to categories—have become cultural defaults.

Wilkins also reminded us that King’s heart widened rather than narrowed as his life progressed. Near the end, King’s vision moved toward the Poor People’s Campaign—bringing “poor people of all kinds” to Washington to confront the reality of poverty. And in Memphis, he attached his moral authority to sanitation workers so degraded they marched wearing signs that read, “I AM A MAN.” The point is not nostalgia; the point is moral clarity: the work of justice is not performed in the abstract, and it is not sustained by applause. It is carried forward by costly promises kept—King’s simple explanation for returning to Memphis was: “Because I promised them I would come.”

In a culture where vows are light and exit ramps are plentiful, that sentence alone preaches.

Finally, Wilkins offered a scene that has stayed with me for years: King in a crowded Chicago apartment, no cameras, no journalists, no stage—patiently engaging angry young men, “the wretched of the earth,” in a kind of Socratic dialogue about nonviolence, refusing to let them leave until each had pledged to do no violence. Not a performance. Not a headline. Just a man, late at night, doing the hard personal work of persuasion—treating those young men with respect they may never have received, bearing their fury without flinching, and calling them upward.

That is the kind of moral leadership our moment desperately needs: not curated outrage, but courageous service; not mere talk, but action; not self-salvation through public virtue-signaling, but the costly love of neighbor that shows up where no one is watching.

As I publish these excerpts online for the first time, my hope is modest and earnest: that Wilkins’s witness will help us remember Dr. King more truthfully—and that remembering him truthfully will press us to live more faithfully. The question remains, for each of us, in our vocations and callings:

You have been given much.

And then what?

I found an editor’s note from MLK Day 2004 that noted

For King the meaning of this inquiry was all significant and far from trivial.  And it was by invoking natural law principles that he was made able to distinguish just codes from the unjust, while remaining faithful to a rule of law that respected human dignity above all else.  And only then, through the vehicle of civil disobedience and peaceful assembly, was he made equipped to serve the poor and disenfranchised as a man among men.  Few have ever chartered such waters with the courage and humility that live on in his name.  

This editor’s note provides a fitting transition to the excerpts of Mr. Wilkins’ remarks during my time with him on MLK Day 2004, as he shared them with university law students and faculty two decades ago.

ROGER WILKINS: 

I am really delighted to be here to talk to you in my home state about my colleague, my friend, Martin Luther King, Jr., and to try to draw some lessons from my understanding of who and what he was that are appropriate for us today.

I think that I would best say it by saying that Martin was a man of great good fortune.  He and I were virtual contemporaries—he born in 1929 and I in 1932—black males born in segregation and in the depression.  People have viewed me, because my uncle, Roy Wilkins (who headed the NAACP) as a person who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.  But compared to Martin, I was a poor kid.  Martin was born with something that no other black males of his generation had, and that was the prospect of a major legacy from his father, Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr. As you know, King Sr. was pastor of one of the major black churches in America.  And all Martin had to do was to finish college, get his divinity degree, go back to Atlanta, become assistant pastor in his father’s church, and ultimately, he would have inherited that church.  And it would have been a life of leadership, prestige, and free of financial worry.

To Whom Much Is Given, Much Is Required

But Martin used his great good fortune in a very different way.  He used it to motivate himself in a crusade for justice that consumed his adult life, after his life as a student.  People who have law degrees are very fortunate people in a world in which at least a third of the people live in abject poverty.  To have an American law degree in such a world makes us very, very privileged people.

 The question at that moment is, “And then what?”  And that was Martin’s question.  How do you answer, “And then what?”  Obviously, religious leaders have their answers.  I am not a religious leader.  I am a lawyer who, by and large, has lived his life in a variety of occupations, working on issues of civil rights and human rights.  And so, I can only give you my answer to the “and then what?” 

With good fortune in this world comes responsibility.  If I understand any message from the life of Martin Luther King, it is that.  The “and then what?” means that you use your good fortune to heal what is ailing within the sight of your eyes.  When I speak about Martin, I am speaking to people who may not ever hear, in person, from someone who knew him and knew him well. 

I would say, first, that people narrow him when he is presented as simply an orator, when his life is boiled down to that one speech that he made in 1963 on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.  It is as if, and it plays over, and over, and over, and over on this holiday, as if that was the only contribution he made to this country.  And it is as if somehow, he had this gift and he could stand up and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and that was who he was.  Well, I want to tell you, one of the first things to say about Martin Luther King is that he was one of the smartest people I ever met.  He was intellectually gifted.  He was curious.  He was a reader.  You never encountered Martin when he wasn’t carrying a book and it wasn’t a light novel either.  He didn’t read Danielle Steel.

And he’d always ask you, “Have you seen this book?  Do you know this author?  What do you think?”  He would engage in ideas.  And it’s hard to think about it when you see him always pictured either standing or marching, but Martin spent a lot of time at a desk writing.  He wrote some brilliant sermons; he wrote some books; he wrote the searing letter from Birmingham City Jail.  He was a thinker.  An intellectual. 

Courage

The second thing about him was that he was the bravest human being I’ve ever known.

Martin King was a man who learned in Montgomery—when the first bomb went off aimed at him and his family—that any day that he woke up there was somebody somewhere who wanted to kill him.  Having been in the Department of Justice, I had access to some of the intelligence about the threats to Martin, and there were many of them.  So many that you couldn’t warn him about everything.  We warned him about the things that seemed too real, imminent, and frightening.   But you knew enough about these threats to understand that this man’s life was always in danger. 

Many years ago, when I was in New York, fifteen years or so after King was killed, NBC did a movie on his life.  And the movie showed him at one point being afraid.  And when we walked out of the movie, a lot of the people who were around me were saying, “That’s a terrible movie.  That’s a terrible movie.  They showed Martin being afraid.  Martin was never afraid.  Martin couldn’t have been afraid.”  I didn’t say anything.  Martin Luther King was not crazy; to live the life he lived and not feel fear would have been crazy.  It would have been a total denial of a horrendous reality. 

 Bravery is not never being afraid.  Bravery is recognizing what is threatening you, understanding it as real threat—and going out and doing what you must do anyway.  And that’s what he did, day after day, year after year, even though he understood that there might well be someone out there who might be after him.

The third thing I would say about him is that, as eloquent as his words were when he spoke, as profound as his writings were when he wrote for us, his actions speak to us with the greatest power.  And it seems to me that there are three which bear repeating to you today.

Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You

The campaign that Martin was planning at the end of his life was called the “poor people’s campaign,” which was scheduled for June, 1968.  And I knew that one intimately because Attorney General Ramsey Clark had assigned to me the task of coordinating the U.S. Government’s preparations for the march and for the demonstrations – as well as serving as the chief liaison to Martin Luther King, Jr., and his SCLC.[ii]  And so, he and I, through the late winter and early spring of 1968, had many discussions, some in person, some on the telephone, about what he planned.  And what it was he planned was to bring poor people of all kinds to the Mall in Washington D.C. to present American poverty to the American government and to the American people.  And they were going to camp on the mall.  If any of you have been to Washington recently, the area in which they were going to camp was, is now about where the Korean War Memorial is.  And he believed that in essence the problem was an economic thing.  That poverty was not only crippling black people, but white people, brown people, red people, all people.  And that’s what he planned to do.  That was in his heart and what he would have done had he lived out the months of April and May and into June of 1968.    His heart was large, rich and powerful and it reached out to everyone without regard to any particular limitations whatsoever. 

The second thing I would commend to your attention is what he was doing when he died.  He was in Memphis, Tennessee.  He had brought his prestige and his concern to the cause of some of the most reviled workers in America, the sanitation men of Memphis.  Black men.  And poor men.  Abused workers.  This was not his first visit to Memphis; it was his third.  And on his second visit, the march he led had degenerated into violence.

There were black people who didn’t like Martin.  A lot of people didn’t like him.  And so, there was a lot of quarreling and I tell you, the government didn’t like him.  Lyndon Johnson’s government didn’t like him.  Some of us in Justice did but he had opposed the war.  And so, when this march disintegrated, there were a lot of people who were crowing and said, “Ah hah, that non-violence was not going to work.”

And we went back to Atlanta.  He was told by a lot of people, “Don’t go.  Don’t go back to Memphis.  It may be violent again.  You may lose prestige.  Your enemies may be able to attack you.”  And when I asked, “Why are you going back?” He said simply, “Because I promised them I would come.”  And so, he went.

Now, I saw those men the day after Martin was killed.  We saw the leaders of SCLC and then we went to see the sanitation men marching.  If any of you have been in a demonstration, you know that people look at you funny when you’re demonstrating.  They say, “What are those people doing on the street making a spectacle of themselves?”  And if you are in a big crowd, with lots of people around you, you feel strengthened by your numbers.  But if you are walking by yourself and people can see you and you are naked to the world . . . .  These men were walking one by one, ten or fifteen feet apart, each one of them a black man by himself, and each one wearing a sandwich sign that said on the front and back, “I am a man.”  Now, if the municipality which employs you treats you so badly that you have to proclaim to the world, that “I am a man,” you know that these people were degraded. I knew it then, when the attorney general and I went to see the mayor of the city that very day in the afterglow of the murder of Martin Luther King.  The very next day, this mayor spoke about these men with contempt.  But that is who Martin was in Memphis to see.  Probably the most famous American.  Nobel Prize winner.  Man of peace who was so strong in his love for human beings and his hatred of war that he opposed his own country at the time of war and was viewed virtually as a traitor by some people, including in the government where I worked.  He brought every ounce of his moral authority to those men.

The work of justice and the work of decency is not easy work.  There’s a lot to do.  It is not easy.  It’s not going to be fixed in anybody’s lifetime.  But your effort, your effort and this hard work that is before you will make it better for somebody.  Maybe a lot of somebodies.  And your hard work in these efforts will make it better for you because you will, in your soul when you get old like me, have a sense that the power of your life was used for some human good.  It’s the best thing that a human being can have as I understand it.

The last lesson from Martin’s life is that when he went from the South to the North, he met challenges that he had never seen before.  His life was not a direct march from the university through Montgomery and Atlanta and all of these places to Birmingham to glory.  There were lots of fits and starts, and all kinds of very difficult decisions.  But Martin was a brilliant leader.  They say herding cats is hard.  Just imagine herding Baptist ministers.  But, he did it.  He did it. 

He got to Chicago and he was swallowed up by Richard J. Daley’s bureaucracy.  But when he went to Chicago, he said, “I’m gonna live in the ghetto and I’m gonna see what I can do here.”   There was a major rebellion in Chicago that summer and President Johnson sent John Door, who was assistant attorney general in charge of civil rights, and me to Chicago to try to do something about it.  And usually, if anybody said to you, you know, there’s a riot in such and such a city, you say, “Are you crazy?  I mean what the heck can I do?”  When the president says it, you say, “Yes, sir.”  You just go.  So, John and I get to Chicago and we figure, well, it’s late, why don’t we go see Martin and see what he thinks about what’s going on here.  So, we called him and he said, “Well, yeah, come on over but don’t come now, I’ve got a meeting going on.  Come around midnight.”  So, we said, “Okay.”

We met with some other people and then we made our way over . . . the Illinois National Guard was controlling the streets with armored personnel carriers and jeeps with machine guns on them.  And as we made our way through this city, it was eerie because there was no street life.  Finally, we got to the apartment in Lawndale and it was ghetto, it was deep ghetto.  And the building was very worn and very old.  We walked in and there was no lock on the front door and there was, there was musty smells, urine smells in the stairwells.  And you walked up and it was hot.  It was July in Chicago and Chicago was very hot that day and the higher you went, Martin was on the top floor, fourth floor as I recall, the higher up you went, the hotter it got even though it was midnight.  We got to the top floor; we knocked on the apartment door and then paint was peeling off the door.  And the door wouldn’t open.  Somebody was trying to open it and at first, I thought it was a door that was just not working.  But then I realized the reason the person couldn’t open the door was that there were so many people inside the room that he was trying to move the people and the door at the same time and so he got it and John and I slipped in sideways and the person who was tugging on the door trying to get it open for us was Andy Young.  Andy finally got it open far enough for us to get in and we got in and we saw why the door couldn’t open.  There was no room for anybody.  There were people all over the place.  Everywhere.  We made our way to the corner of the room and what I realized was that Martin had the wretched of the earth in that room.  He had tough, black Chicago street kids, gang members.  Kids that people had thrown away, kids that people feared, kids that people despised.  Martin just paused as we came in and said, “These are men sent by the President,” and he introduced us.  And then he went back to doing what he was doing.

What he was doing was he was having a Socratic dialogue with this whole room full of kids about non-violence because they were furious that the Illinois National Guard was on their turf and had taken their turf.  They wanted to go out and confront the National Guard which had, at the very least, machine guns and God knows what else.  And they had their knives and some Molotov cocktails and some stones.  And they would’ve been killed. 

And here is Martin Luther King, derided by lots of people as a headline hunter.  There was not a camera in that room.  There was not a journalist in that room.  There were no outsiders in that room.  There was Martin Luther, by himself, quietly preaching non-violence to these kids. He answered every question, no matter how often it had been asked.  He was patient, he was intent, he treated those kids with enormous respect, probably more respect than they’d ever gotten in their lives.  He wouldn’t let them out of that room until each one of them had individually pledged to him that they would go home and do no violence, and that he would come back tomorrow and engage himself in some of the activities that SCLC was leading. 

He didn’t have to do that.  He didn’t have to be there.  He didn’t have to care for those kids.  He could’ve been in Atlanta—safe, secure, money rolling in.  Here he was—answering the question that every one of us who was advantaged, who was fortunate, needs to ask. 

He gets a good fortune and then what?  His “and then what” was to go out and heal whatever hurt he could touch as best he could as long as he could.  And that is what he did and that I think was his most enduring legacy for the rest of us.     

[i] Roger Wilkins (1932-2017) served as the Clarence J. Robinson Professor of History and American Culture at George Mason University in Virginia.  He served as an assistant attorney general and wrote for both the New York Times and the Washington Post.  While on the editorial staff at the latter, he was a co-recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for his work on the Watergate story.  Mr. Wilkins served as chair of the Board of Trustees of the Africa-America Institute and was a member of the Board of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He was also publisher of NAACP's journal Crisis and served on the Board of Trustees of the University of the District of Columbia and on the District of Columbia Board of Education.

[ii] The Southern Christian Leadership Conference was established with the goal of redeeming the soul of America through nonviolent resistance. Its main objective was to coordinate nonviolent protests throughout the South. Martin Luther King, Jr. served as president of SCLC from its founding in 1957 until his death in 1968. Stanford University, King Institute