A hitch in my thoughts, though, came as we passed under the shadow of the clock tower at Denver East High School, where two of our children are students. Our (white) kids are getting a great education there—better than my own private high school education years ago, with the added benefit of a multicultural, multiracial learning environment. My kids are doing fine. What could be better?

What could be better is that even at East, one of the best-performing and most racially integrated schools in the district, there is a deeply disturbing level of social segregation and disparity of achievement between racial and economic groups. Stories at the dinner table, visits to the school, poring over CSAP scores—they all point to realities so far from King’s vision that people wonder out loud how far we’ve come.

Part 1 of the current Piton/Harvard study shows that since the end of court-ordered busing in 1995, Denver schools have become resegregated—no surprise. It won’t be surprising when Part 2, due out this spring, shows a dramatic widening of the achievement gap between white and minority students.

Every time I take little forays into caring about this as a parent and community member, I end up numb from the complexity and intransigence of the problem. Easier to retreat into simply figuring out the best educational option for my own kids (no easy task each year), and enjoying our annual January jaunt down Colfax together with friends of various races.

Two things slap me upside th’head. First, close friendships with kids and families on the other side of the gap. Second, more than any other voice, that of “Dear Brother Martin” as my pastor still calls him after these many years. Each year I pull from my shelf Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., and let words like this rock me all over again:

Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other word. It is the word “maladjusted.” Now we all should seek to live a well adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities. But there are some things within our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted and to which I call upon you to be maladjusted. I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination…. I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic effects of the methods of physical violence and to tragic militarism. I call upon you to be maladjusted to such things. I call upon you to be as maladjusted as Amos who in the midst of the injustices of his day cried out in words that echo across the generations, “Let judgment roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” As maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln who had the vision to see that this nation could not exist half slave and half free. As maladjusted as Jesus of Nazareth who dreamed a dream of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. God grant that we will be able to go out and change our world and our civilization. And then we will be able to move from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man to the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.

(pp. 14-15, speech before an audience of YMCA and YWCA students in California, 4 June 1957)

On one hand King’s words can seem over-the-top grandiose, especially when he cranks up the final rhetorical flourish on a speech. But there’s got to be a reason they just won’t stop echoing in my ears. Every winter I sit down with this good book in one hand and the Good Book in the other, and read and read and read. Reading King at length I find not just the famous sound bites (though he was phenomenally good at those), but a theology of uncommon vitality—beyond liberal or conservative, and even for our time, up to the task of addressing God’s call on our private and public lives. The shalom/peace of God witnessed to in the scriptures (when read at length as King clearly did) involves not only individual advancement and personal salvation, but social transformation. In remembering Dr. King as merely a black civil rights leader—important enough for his place in history—one might forget that his vision and struggle went far beyond simply that of “his own,” whether it be his own people or his own time. He was audacious enough to articulate a vision for all people and all time, with an intellectual rigor and spiritual intensity still very much worth tapping into. For a look at what I mean, take 20 minutes and click on this speech from a cold night in 1963.

Ok, I don’t know what it will mean for me, but I can’t be at ease with the achievement gap in my neighborhood schools.

Q: How is God calling you to be maladjusted?