It’s been nearly 40 years since Martin Luther King was assassinated one spring day in Memphis; it’s been more than 40 years since he stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial and delivered the immortal “I Have a Dream” speech. It has been just a little over 50 years since he first came to prominence during the Montgomery Bus Boycotts, in the early days of what we now call the Civil Rights Movement.

While this is a generally accepted label for this time period (roughly 1954-1968), what it implies is a bit questionable– after all, Homer Plessy was certainly fighting for his civil rights, as did the freed slaves and their supporters in the wake of the Civil War, when the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments were added to the Constitution. In a sense, there’s always been a Civil Rights Movement.

In that sense is how I view Dr. King. As we remember Martin Luther King today, quite a few of us around the nation know who he was, and that today is in honor of him. But as a Washington Post article this morning illustrates, a fair number of people out there are misinformed and lacking in knowledge about the basic elements and events of King’s life. King was a man of his times, but he also now belongs to the ages.

On one hand, as a historian and a person interested in increasing knowledge everywhere, I’m alarmed: the actions and message of King’s life should not be lost, especially not so soon after his death. Millions of people are still alive whose lifespans were contemporary with King’s to some degree; countless people still live who were there that August day in 1963. Just as people of my generation remember where they were when the Challenger exploded and other seminal events, so people of an earlier generation remember when they learned of King’s death, and the two Kennedys before him. That we should now as a society begin to forget potentially dooms us to the aphorism of George Santyana: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

But in another sense, I am not dismayed: as the article notes, many “thought that King was advocating the abolition of slavery” in his “I Have a Dream” speech.

They are not far wrong. King was speaking of the slavery of oppression, of the chains of injustice, of the bondage of second-class citizenship. In a sense, segregation was far more pernicious than slavery; it enslaved everyone, both blacks and whites, within a system that prevented people from treating each other on an individual basis as human beings, but instead as a collective “other.” While King and his companions specifically fought for equality for blacks and an end to Jim Crow, the message King sent resonated far beyond the simple contrast of black vs. white; although many equate the words “civil rights” with blacks, civil rights are about all of us. The American Dream King spoke of is the same dream hundreds of thousands of Latinos, legal or illegal, aspire to. The promises of America are the same ones women have an equal right to. The notion of equal access and fair play for all is one that we deaf have long sought. The right to dignity that we all deserve, that gays and lesbians struggle for. To limit King’s actions and words to an era of “whites only ” drinking fountains and “colored” waiting rooms in train stations, a time when blacks could not receive treatment in “white” hospitals or receive the same instruction as white children, is to limit the universal intentions of King– the notion that one day, we will all be free at last from the collective “other”; from viewing each other through the prism of systems constructed and designed to divide.

Today, on King’s actual birthday, January 15, it is not just a day to remember a man of his times, a product of his era, but a man who spoke for humanity, who at the end of his life worked towards eradicating the foundations of economic inequality, the foundations that supported barriers based on differences. The various movements that followed in the wake of the struggles of King’s day range from the Stonewall riots and subsequent awakening of the gay community, to the continuation of the ongoing battle for civil rights on behalf of women, to the boycotts led by César Chávez on behalf of migrant workers, to our own student strike at Gallaudet in 1988, when we declared ourselves capable of self-government.

To me, that is the true meaning of King’s life: the celebration of the life and works of a dedicated foot soldier in the march for human rights: not white rights, not black rights, not sexual rights, not yellow rights, not brown rights, not hearing rights, not deaf rights, but human rights. May Martin Luther King continue to inspire the pursuit of human rights, not just annually on January 15, but every day.