Next Monday, a broad spectrum of Americans will honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. — broader than that which ever honored him while he was alive. At the time of his death, King had taken controversial stances in favor of striking workers and against the war in Vietnam, which alienated him from many white Northern liberals. For the first time, King had slipped off the list of the top 10 most admired people in America.

Now that King is dead, it’s much easier to recast him as merely an opponent of legalized discrimination. Those of us who are not segregationists — most people on this campus — can all pat ourselves on the back and say we were on the right side of history.

But that would be an injustice to King’s memory. It is better to remember him by the things he would fight for in today’s world. Here are four to start with:

Poverty wages: Since King’s death, the value of the minimum wage has declined 36 percent from $8.18 to $5.15 an hour and has decreased even more relative to housing prices. Poverty is increasing, particularly among low-paid blacks, even as corporate profits recover. Meanwhile, the right to join a union has been rolled back both in law and by increasingly sophisticated anti-union campaigns.

As King said, “We must join the war against poverty and believe in the dignity of all work . . . What makes [a job] menial is that we don’t pay folks anything. Give somebody a job and pay them some money so they can live and educate their children and buy a home and have the basic necessities of life. And no matter what the job is, it takes on dignity.”

King would have been concerned by the conclusions of the recent President’s Advisory Committee on Labor Practices’ report at Stanford: that we do not even monitor campus wages and so can’t say how many of our campus workers live in poverty.

The Iraq war: King quoted a Vietnamese Buddhist that “the image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism,” and he called the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” King would argue that the more we hunt enemies in Iraq and ignore civilian casualties that result from our actions, we will turn sympathizers into enemies.

King would have favored arms embargoes and an oil boycott against the tyrant Hussein, but he would have argued that only peaceful uprising by the Iraqi people could change the regime.

But King also objected to the effect of the Vietnam war on American society. As in his day, the Iraq war is draining government resources from programs like Head Start and No Child Left Behind, just as they drained the war on poverty in his time. Fortunately, blacks no longer bear the disproportionate burden of military service: Blacks now enlist at the same rate as white people; the disproportionately black military is because blacks stay in the military longer, perhaps because they get a fairer shake there than in civilian society. But it is nevertheless the case that military recruiters disproportionately target poor people to pay the cost of our nation’s violent impulses.

Disenfranchisement of black voters: It indicates a broader problem with our failed crusade against drugs that one in four black men are incarcerated or under prison-system supervision. But more immediately, barring former felons from voting, like any purge of voters, rapidly leads to opportunistic manipulation by politicians.

As with 1960s Jim Crow literacy tests, Florida officials today applied the test differently to blacks than other demographic groups in order to reduce black turnout. Felon-barring would be less of a problem if it didn’t occur in the context of systematic intimidation.

New ID checks at the polls and new ties between prison records and voting rights played right into the fliers distributed in black neighborhoods saying that nobody with outstanding parking tickets could vote.

Lines were up to eight hours long in black precincts in swing states, as machines were mothballed and moved to less-populated precincts.

Due to technology disparities, machines in black areas were much less likely to register countable votes and were much more likely to break down or malfunction. White America has never paid enough attention to these issues. Before an election nobody will stand up for the rights of former felons; demanding distribution of voting machines to black areas sounds like “playing the race card.” After the election, everyone says the election’s over, as though the only point of voting rights is to get your candidate elected.

The “Patriot” Act: The founders believed the only trustworthy government was one divided against itself and closely watched by its citizens. King learned this the hard way as the target of an FBI smear campaign. The FBI wiretapped his home, office, advisors and hotel rooms when he traveled, investigated his extramarital affairs, smeared him as a homosexual, manipulated funders of his organization, released both real and fake documents to friendly media sources, infiltrated his organization, planted drugs on supporters during “sneak and peek” searches, and planted papers on trusted aides that made them appear to be informants; creating a climate of distrust within the organization.

The Patriot Act removes many of the civil-society protections enacted in the aftermath of the FBI’s King harassment campaign. It allows executive branch officials to infiltrate political and religious organizations, to operate secretly and without judicial review, and to keep searches secret from targets. It is not clear why Congressional and court oversight hampers counterterrorism, but it does permits harassment of the sort that King — and various contemporary peace groups — have experienced.

We honor King as an activist. It is true that he changed the face of our country, and we should celebrate this achievement. But to truly honor his visionary spirit we must look not to the past, but to the future. King dreamed that one day this nation would rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed, “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.” Until his dream is realized, the best way to remember King in death is to work toward the ideals he espoused in his lifetime.

Kai Stinchcombe is a second-year graduate student in political science and former president of the Stanford Democrats.