If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing the ground…. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will.

—Frederick Douglass

I wonder, sometimes, whether we’re doing the right thing in the way we honor civil rights pioneers like Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks.

There’s scarcely a politician in the country today who has anything but warm words of praise for King and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Which is strange. During King’s lifetime, there were armies of politicians resisting the civil rights movement every single step of the way.

Rosa Parks came to public attention by being arrested. She was hauled to jail; mug shots and fingerprints were taken. Martin Luther King was arrested many times. He was vilified in language that makes my face feel hot even today.

His non-violent movement was met with dogs and clubs, tear gas, firehoses, guns and bombs. But today, politicians of almost every political stripe stepped up to podiums across the nation with smiles and glowing words about the civil rights movement.

Have we really changed so much since the 1960s? I doubt it.

Tomorrow, many of those smiling politicians will go back to work tying the law in knots to find ways to disenfranchise black voters. It won’t be on account of race—oh, no—they’ll have to find some dodge to explain it. They will approve tax breaks carefully calibrated to benefit millionaires, and then plead poverty to make cuts in programs for poor people.

I wonder whether we’ve made a mistake making Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks icons of the civil rights movement. I don’t think they ever intended to be put on pedestals and serenely admired as heroes of a glorious past. I don’t think they ever intended their struggle for social justice to be turned into an historical relic.

Some of the old injustices are gone, thank goodness, but there’s plenty of injustice left. To honor the memory of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, we need to carry on the work. We need to press the fight against injustice wherever we find it.

How can we tell whether we’re doing it right? There will be an army of politicians resisting every single step of the way.