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In 1970, the year I entered first grade, enrollment in Memphis public schools reached an all time high of 148,000. Two years later the city implemented a court-ordered, full-fledged desegregation plan that included busing as a remedy. White reaction was calm and swift; by the time I reached fifth grade, more than 30,000 white students had fled the public schools and the numbers just kept a tumbling. Today Memphis City Schools –  like most urban systems north and south and east and west – are nearly 90 percent children of color. Which, in Memphis, pretty much still means black kids.

Segregation to resegregation in forty years flat. 

Of course, Dr. King was about much more than little black boys and little black girls sitting down with little white girls and little white boys at the lunch table of brotherhood. This is the Hotpockets version of his legacy: sliced, diced, wrapped in pastry and slipped warm into your hand for easy consumption, no muss no fuss. Dr. King advocated societal and economic justice and the equality of opportunity, and only the most mendacious will argue that we have as much – across racial and economic lines – today. This is true in housing and in health care, true in juvenile justice and especially in education, the lynchpin to it all.

Some will argue that what the Movement Warriors were fighting for was not necessarily integration but desegregation, two entirely different things, and that our children do not have to sit in class with white kids to learn, and that parents bear their share of responsibility and that we need to make all schools better for whoever shows up. All of this is true.

Equally true is this: urban public schools serve primarily children of color, and urban public schools, by and large, are failing. This week, a new report shows that 17 of the nation's 50 largest cities had high school graduation rates lower than 50 percent, with some, like Detroit, as low as 25 percent.

I cannot find graduation rates for the Memphis schools in the 1980s when I graduated high school; all I have is anecdotal evidence that nearly every black kid I knew got at least that far.

In some ways, it reminds me of the story of the Lorraine Motel itself. In the 40s, 50s and 60s it was one of the few public places in the south where black Americans could stay, and so it housed not only Kings but Queens:  Cab Calloway, BB King, Aretha Franklin, Count Basie, Nat King Cole. After King's death it became a residential motel: shabby, run-down, largely derelict. When the old hotel was turned into the National Civil Rights Museum in the 1980s, the last tenant was evicted to make way for the museum, and as recently as 2003 she was still protesting what she saw as the commercialization of Dr. King's dream.

I think the museum is an important monument to Dr. King, but I can see her point. In the Memphis of my youth the Lorraine was a dump, and we never talked about Dr. King. But we were living him.

Now we talk about him all the time.

Kim McLarin is a novelist. Her most recent book was "Jump at the Sun."

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