Dr. King gave the world an amazing gift – his dream. It’s our job to use it. With genocide in Darfur continuing and Washington growing increasingly apathetic to the problems of real Americans, there’s no more urgent time to study and live by Dr. King’s legacy of love and respect.

Dr. King traveled over six million miles and spoke over 2,500 times from 1957 to 1968 appearing wherever there was injustice, protest and action. He traveled all those miles so our children could come so far. We cannot risk losing all that he did and said and wrote.

Yet as we struggle to keep his dream alive, tens of thousands of pages of records on Dr. King are still classified by the United States government, many of which are not scheduled for release until 2038.

That is why Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and I are pushing for the release of all records on Dr. King through the Martin Luther King, Jr., Record Collections Act. Fully releasing these records and making them publicly available and accessible will shed light on the life and legacy of Dr. King, as well as a difficult and tumultuous time in American history.

Our legislation will create a Martin Luther King Records Collection at the National Archives. This will include all records – public and private – related to the life and death of Dr. King, including any investigations or inquiries by federal, state, or local agencies. The records will be organized in a central directory to allow the public to access them online from anywhere in the world. The documents will be overseen by a review board consisting of at least one professional historian, one attorney, one researcher, and one representative of the civil rights community.

Given recent news accounts that the government has begun removing thousands of declassified documents on a wide range of historical subjects from public access at the National Archives, there has perhaps never been a more urgent time to bring the records on Dr. King into the light of day. According to the National Archives, about 9,500 records totaling more than 55,000 pages have been withdrawn from the public shelves and reclassified since 1999. We need to ensure that the records relating to the life and death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. do not suffer the same fate. They are too important to us at this point in American history.

Dr. King challenged the conscience of my generation, and his words and his legacy continue to move generations to action today. His love and faith is alive in the millions of Americans who volunteer each day in soup kitchens or in schools, and those who refused to ignore the suffering of thousands they'd never met when Hurricane Katrina destroyed lives and communities. His vision and his passion are alive in churches and on campuses when millions stand up against the injustice of discrimination or the indifference that leaves too many behind.

The best way to honor the memory of Dr. King is to finish his work at home and around the world. And the first step to furthering his legacy is to know the full body of it.

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