Boston Globe columnist Adrian Walker interviews the historian Taylor Branch, who has just published the third, and last, installment of his critically acclaimed series on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. At Canaan’s Edge follows King in the last three years of the activist’s life, as he fought to extend his message of justice beyond Jim Crow while struggling to inspire a movement increasingly disillusioned with nonviolent protest.

In Parting the Waters we saw King rise from obscurity as leader of the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, a young, charismatic black preacher in a South boiling with racial hatred and violence; in Pillar of Fire we watched him give a hopeful nation a glimpse of the promised land as the legendary orator of the 1963 March on Washington, inspiring legions amid the firestorm unleashed by Freedom Rides and congressional legislation, bombings and assassinations. But it is in the last years of his life that we see King tested as never before. Young Americans turned away from his teachings. Mainstream America turned its back on his increasingly caustic criticisms of the Vietnam War. We sometimes forget how hated King became in those years, even among the liberal intelligentsia: TIME magazine called one of his speeches “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi,” and The Washington Post argued that King had “diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.”

“He became more and more lonely, in my view,” Branch says of these last years of King’s life.

But King’s willingness to expand the horizons of his activism in those years is perhaps the reason he is most relevant to us today. Four decades earlier, he was talking about poverty in the global South, joblessness in America, and the moral and social costs of warmongering abroad and — yes — capitalism at home. “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?” Jesus proclaimed to his followers, and King, addressing strikers in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968, echoed those words:

What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t have enough money to buy a hamburger? What does it profit a man to be able to eat at the swankest integrated restaurant when he doesn’t even earn enough money to take his wife out to dine? What does it profit one to have access to the hotels of our cities, and the hotels of our highways, when we don’t earn enough money to take our family on a vacation? What does it profit one to be able to attend an integrated school, when he doesn’t earn enough money to buy his children school clothes?

Political liberties were not enough, King said. Economic equality was also necessary, for without it there would be no dignity to speak of, no freedom to defend. And so King and other activists organized the “Poor People’s Campaign,” which sought to rally a “multiracial army of the poor” on behalf of an economic bill of rights that would bring opportunity to America’s poorest communities.

This struggle that King championed in his final years remains with us today, from the rusting factories of America’s heartland to the broken cities of its urban core, where workers of all races and ethnicities continue to struggle for a living wage and basic healthcare.

“His Nobel acceptance speech said that the triple evils are racism, poverty, and war,” Branch said in the Globe interview. “And that nonviolence and democracy are equipped to address these both politically and spiritually.” That political stance became increasingly controversial in the late 1960s, but King did not back down. At a time of deep national divisions over the war in Vietnam, he dared to call America “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” a bellicose nation that sought to occupy Vietnam as its “colony” — words that would likely place him among the reviled ranks of Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore today. At a time when American eyes were fixated on their military’s travails in Vietnam or the social strife and malaise within their own borders, King looked elsewhere, calling for an end to American support of brutal generals in countries like Venezuela, Guatemala, Colombia, and Peru. “The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy- and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation,” he said in 1967.

He was searching for the big solutions. The problems besetting America did not lie merely with lone racists and tyrants, King came to believe. They were more deep-rooted than that. Speaking to a New York church audience exactly one year before his death, he declared that the entire system of economic and social injustice needed to be transformed:

True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

It was King at his most fiery, his most controversial, his most defiant. He was ignored by many then. Even decades later, the King who emerged in those last three years of his life remains forgotten, eclipsed by the anti-segregation crusader who stood so tall in Washington.

Perhaps another generation will live to see his parting words remembered and their truth recognized.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen