This year Google searches for “black lives matter” surpassed searches for “civil rights movement.”

That factoid, posted on screen during Sunday’s debate among the Democratic primary candidates, isn’t surprising – but it strikes me as apt and telling.  

Martin Luther King seems far away this year, even as concern about race relations and everyday circumstances for African-Americans seems near at hand.

On the face of it, Dr. King is still right in the center of things.   Selma is a new release on Netflix and as an Amazon download.  In his address to Congress, Pope Francis cited Dr. King as one of four “representative Americans,” along with Abraham Lincoln, Dorothy Day, and Thomas Merton.  The year just past was a year distinguished by nonviolent protest more than any year since Dr. King’s death: in Baltimore, in St. Louis, in Chicago, and especially in Charleston, where the families of the people who died in the mass shooting at Emanuel AME Church openly forgave the man who killed them.   And the first black president – who has distinguished himself in all sorts of ways – did so especially with his remarks on the Charleston shooting and its aftermath.  

My own feeling for Dr. King is undiminished: he is, if not the greatest American, then the American whose greatness appeals to me most powerfully.  And if Georgetown’s slate of events surrounding Martin Luther King Day is any indication, he is undiminished culturally, too.  There will be a dozen events across ten days, from a concert at the Kennedy Center to a teach-in on nonviolence to a ceremony that joins remembrace of Dr. King to the church’s Year of Mercy and to a reflection on Georgetown’s participation in the practices of slavery and racial discrimination in decades past.    

Dr. King’s book title Why We Can’t Wait is now a hashtag to reckon with.   And yet Dr. King himself seems to be at a distance this year.  Why is that?  It may be that, after half a century, and the natural deaths of many in the civil rights movement, the link between his legacy and one’s personal association with him has been broken, and now Martin Luther King belongs to all of us, free at last.  It may be that with Black Lives Matter, the movement for equal rights for African Americans has a fresh outlook – a fresh set of arguments and imagery – for the first time in a generation. 

In those respects, the diminishing of Martin Luther King’s legacy – if it is true – may be a good thing, a chance for other people to lead, challenge, and inspire.   And yet I worry that much of what he represented is easily lost and not so easily regained.  His rock-solid identification of racial justice with religious faith; his conviction that nonviolence is not a tactic but a way of life; his affirmation of patience as a virtue and a strategy, not as a form of weakness or a failure of nerve: his recognition that even collective and egalitaritarian mass movements need individual leaders who are willing to stick out from the group: as Black Lives Matter takes the movement for racial justice forward, there’s a risk that these things will be underestimated.

Lest we forget, #MLKMatters.