To make my two-hour layover in the George Bush Intercontinental airport a little less two-hours-longish, I picked up a bag of pretzel M&Ms and a copy of The Atlantic’s Martin Luther King Jr. special edition issue.

Having been an editor at a newspaper for nearly two years now, I couldn’t help but flip through the pages of The Atlantic’s “King Issue” (as they took to calling it) without thinking about how much thought and deliberation must have gone into every decision they made. From the fonts and theme colors they chose to the words which prefaced this special edition in the Editor’s Note, their choices beautifully communicated reverence and recognition without being passive or patronizing.

Devoting an entire magazine issue to a man whose name is so deeply tied to our understanding of America’s relationship with race is a risky move as is. When you add the fact that this magazine was published in the thick of such a contentious season of conversations about race, it makes their decision to publish even bolder.

As I read that issue, I realized very early on that King’s mission was not only to achieve equal status for black men, women and children in America. Don’t get me wrong, that was his primary goal. But his mission stretched further than that.

His mission was to elevate our entire country to a state of equality; the kind of equality that looks past race, past gender, past socioeconomic status, past one’s roots, past one’s education and past our own stereotypes. He was an advocate of human rights and he believed that the human rights issue which needed to be addressed most immediately was racial discrimination against African Americans.

Historically, I believe he was absolutely right to focus on that. He came into adulthood during a time when discriminatory practices left him standing at the back of the bus for hours on end; a time when young men were kept from certain universities because of the color of their skin; a time when there were two separate lines, two separate bathrooms, two separate benches — one for white men and one for those labeled as “colored.”

So, as he began to get involved in protests — peaceful protests, that is — he started to see how effective and how necessary such protests were. From there, his presence in the erupting Civil Rights Movement absolutely exploded. King became the movement’s go-to man, a position he excitedly and conscientiously embraced.

Let me interject, the majority of my assertions in this column are based on the vivid picture I had of King after reading The Atlantic’s special edition issue.

Returning to my point, however, I was surprised to discover that King’s mission was not solely focused on racism, but instead focused on three main intersecting points. As Jeffery Goldberg outlines in his Editor’s Note, those three points are racism, militarism and poverty — points which King himself called the “three major evils.”

Now, interestingly, these points really do seem to exist in a tangle of importance. Much like how bell hooks’ term “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” displays the interconnectedness of those four concepts, King’s “three evils” cannot be isolated from each other because they are incredibly intertwined.

He reminds us that poverty is greatened by the way our government pours money into defense spending. We can even note that the term “defense spending” is essentially a euphemism which weakly disguises our devotion to militarism. Militarism, being a part of those three evils, relates to racism by suggesting — sometimes, not always — that it’s the answer to racial differences. And racism relates to poverty and to militarism by perpetuating the former and being perpetuated by the latter.

All of that said, I think it is important to see how those three evils stretch farther into our society than what we see when we look at issue of white verses black. King was not just advocating for equal treatment of black individuals, but advocating for serious societal reform. He saw the way our culture’s fractured state was destabilizing countless other institutions and he refused to sit back and watch that happen.

On behalf of his wife, Coretta Scott King, he spoke out against the Vietnam War, thus combating militarism. He encouraged us to address poverty by caring for others — perhaps this was because his Christian faith commissioned him to care for those in need. And finally, he loudly, powerfully and eloquently challenged America to rise above our racist roots. He saw hope in our nation and painted that hopeful picture of peace and equality with every word he spoke.

So, I suppose the reason I felt the need to write this was because I feel like the civil rights movement is still alive. In some ways, it has lost its vision and kind of abandoned it’s hope. Therefore, we need to remember that the heart of this movement was the belief that people deserve more. Soldiers deserve better. The impoverished deserve better. And the men and women who still suffer through undue and unacceptable oppression deserve better.

We should not continue to modernize the mission of King, but instead revert back to his tenacious and faithful pursuit of equality. This is the hope he dreamt of and it is the same hope which moved the very mountains we want to push even further.