Looking back at Martin Luther King Jr.’s life work shows a man who was empowered by his revolutionary spirit. As many people take his day of remembrance as an opportunity to post flowery quotes, I feel his most crucial statements get overlooked. Dr. King was truly a revolutionary who would act to change an unjust world. He once said, “Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.”

We still deal with many issues today that Dr. King fought, which many of us have gotten complacent over. Recent census data shows that half of the U.S. population qualifies as poor or low income, with one in five millennials living in poverty. In 2011, 16.7 million children lived in food insecure households. A 2013 UNICEF report ranked the U.S. as having…