This month, the Martin Luther King National Memorial was dedicated on the Mall in Washington, DC, nearly 43 years after his assassination in Memphis, April 4, 1968. He was 39.

From the site one can see the memorial to Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner, whose monument is inscribed with the self-evident truth that all men are created equal. Across the road is the memorial to Lincoln, inscribed with his words at Gettysburg, reiterating Jefferson's compelling proposition that all men are created equal.

Born on the eve of the Great Depression, King saw little of the equality they believed in, or that all three struggled to achieve.

King was nearly 11 when Hitler invaded Poland. He came of age doing the war that followed. He was barely 16 when the world began to see incontrovertible evidence of the horrors of racism given its head, evils long rumored and feared, but on a scale beyond the imagination of all but those who participated in it, or in its eradication.

He was 25 when the Supreme Court declared segregated schools illegal; 33 by the time congress passed legislation guaranteeing his right to vote, 34 before the law of the land guaranteed his right to eat in any public restaurant, or sleep in any hotel open to other Americans. He died at the height of another war, five years later.

His life was a memorial to indefatigable non-violence. May his memorial be not only a monument to his life but a call to action in the spirit he so nobly advanced.