From our Editoral Concord,New Hampshire

I t has now been 40 years since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tenn., and the passage of time has had a curious effect on his legacy - on our memory of the meaning of his message.

We now celebrate Martin Luther King Day and visit Martin Luther King museum exhibits. An MLK National Memorial is planned in Washington, D.C., and there are streets and schools across America named for the slain civil rights leader. Children today learn King's "I Have a Dream" speech in school.

King, who fought both the laws and spirit of racial segregation, was a controversial figure in his day. But four decades on, in our collective memory, he has become a saint.

It is easy for us to remember King as the man simply urging us to judge each other not by the color of our skin but by the content of our character. After all, is there an American alive today who would not embrace that sentiment?

But on the 40th anniversary of his death, let us also remember the parts of King's message that don't sit quite so easily - the sentiments that show us how far America and the world still must journey if we are to truly honor King's legacy.

This, for instance, was King's 1967 assessment of the great war of his time:

"Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and a brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor in America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours."

This was King, also in 1967, on military spending: "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

And this was King on the gulf between rich and poor: "The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty."

King worried, in 1963, about the damaging effect of conformity. He wrote: "Success, recognition, and conformity are the bywords of the modern world where everyone seems to crave the anesthetizing security of being identified with the majority.

He expressed frustration at those who would voiced support for racial justice but accepted slow - or no - progress. "The Negroes of America had taken the President, the press and the pulpit at their word when they spoke in broad terms of freedom and justice. But the absence of brutality and unregenerate evil is not the presence of justice. To stay murder is not the same thing as to ordain brotherhood."

And he was willing to talk, sharply, about not just what unites us, but also what still divides us: "A good many observers have remarked that if equality could come at once the Negro would not be ready for it. I submit that the white American is even more unprepared."

Forty years since King's death, much has changed for the better. But the news of the day - war without end, economic instability, a presidential election in which race is often an undercurrent - reminds us how much of King's dream is yet to be achieved.