In celebrating King's life, we celebrate what he stood for. In doing so, exhortations to continue striving for equality, service to one's fellow man and rededication to brotherhood are all important.

Yet King's life ended in Memphis, allied with garbage workers toiling insufferably long hours for wages so low they qualified for welfare. At the time of his death, King also was preparing for a poor people's march on Washington, organizing people from every state whose lives were mired in stagnating poverty. His aim was a massive protest in which they would present themselves as living witnesses to the plight of millions of Americans drowning in a sea of want and deprivation amid a land of plenty.

King viewed poverty and war – which drained America's resources and diverted the LBJ administration's attention from its commitment to fight poverty – as evils on par with hatred and racism. The mountaintop of which King spoke was one in which all men and women would live with dignity. He saw poverty, violence and war as ungodly impediments to that ambition.

How are we doing in realizing King's dream of eliminating poverty? Between 2000 and 2008, poverty numbers increased by 8.2 million people. In Texas, 20 percent of our children live in poverty, although most live in homes in which adults work.

Thousands of people in our state are routinely and improperly denied food stamps or made to wait inordinately and unnecessarily long periods to be qualified. Students remain in poor and failing schools where soaring dropout rates have created a pipeline to prison for urban youth. Communities of concentrated poverty – marked by economic disinvestment, geographic isolation, environmental hazards and limited access to quality health care – are all reminders that there is still work to do.

The Obama administration has rightly shifted its attention to jobs – job training and job creation. But that work needs to be combined with other strategies, both short and longer term, designed to keep the millions who have lost jobs during this recession from slipping further into poverty as well as rescue those trapped in poverty before our economy teetered on the brink of collapse in 2008.

Some strategies that could be employed to continue King's fight against poverty include:

• Tripling the Earned Income Tax Credit.
• Creating funding for short-term "stepping stone jobs" for people involved in living-wage job training or adult education programs designed to retrain and prepare participants for long-term employment.
• Increasing the number of housing vouchers to deal with homelessness.
• Continuing to increase the minimum wage, to at least $9 an hour over the next three to five years.
• Improving accessibility to food stamps, extending the amount of time people can receive them and increasing the food stamp limit.

Solutions to poverty include both personal responsibility and systemic reform. Our country should be dedicated to funding pathways out of poverty with the same patriotic fervor with which we fund war.

Celebrating Dr. King's life is good and appropriate.

A commitment to continuing his work is better.

(My column also appeared in the Dallas Morning News here)