Monday, Jan. 15, marks the 95th anniversary of the birth of Martin Luther King Jr., one of the great civil rights leaders of American history, whose birthday has been a federal holiday since 1986 and observed in all 50 states since 2000.

King began his journey into the American consciousness first as a preacher in Montgomery, Ala. Like any community-minded leader, he began by working to better the conditions of his flock and his city, until his quest for equal treatment under the law and in the eyes of his God compelled him to work on a larger scale. After leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, King became a national figure.

As a leader of the civil rights movement, he lent his personal and political weight to causes that have made America a more diverse, more integrated and more tolerant nation. King was a leader and a figurehead, but he was not alone in his efforts, and relied on a network of pastors, black churches and both black Americans in the South and white activists motivated to end segregation and Jim Crow laws.

King also borrowed from other leaders and writers to fuel the movement.

Nationally-famous poet Langston Hughes, the father of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote his “Brotherly Love” poem about the boycott that concluded with the lines, “Now listen, white folks! / In line with Reverend King down in Montgomery — Also because the Bible says I must — I’m gonna love you — yes I will! Or BUST!”

In turn, King read Hughes’ poem “Mother to Son” from the pulpit on Mothers’ Day in 1956.

King and Hughes maintained a friendship until Hughes’ death in May 1967, even traveling together to Nigeria in November 1960.

Hughes wrote about King’s civil rights efforts in at least 40 articles in the Chicago Defender and penned several poems about King’s activities. King quoted or paraphrased at least seven Hughes poems in various speeches before he was assassinated in April 1968, according to W. Jason Miller’s book, “Origins of the Dream: Hughes’s Poetry and King’s Rhetoric.”

Hughes had written his poem “Harlem” in 1951, which begins, “What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?”

Lorraine Hansberry turned the poem into the immensely popular Broadway play “Raisin in the Sun” in March 1959, which placed the idea of a failed dream of something better but unreachable both in the national zeitgeist and in the imaginations of civil rights activists.

Only a month later, King delivered the sermon “Unfulfilled Hopes,” using the word “dream” some 15 times, often preceded by words like “shattered,” “unrealized” and “unfulfilled,” echoing Hughes’ “Harlem.”

King’s thoughts on dreams coalesced in his 1963 March on Washington and his famous “I have a dream” speech, which begins on a scale that is small, close and personal: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” before it too “explodes” — as Hughes wrote — onto a national level to change America: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed — we hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal.”

The crux of King’s civil rights movement was not simply to end racial discrimination but to also treat outsiders whose ancestors spoke a different language or who have a different hue of skin, or who pray in a different way, as we would treat our friends, family and next-door neighbors.

As Americans, whatever our background or how we arrived on this soil, we have become one people, unique in the world that we are not united in our language or faith or national origin but by our ideals, enumerated in a Constitution blind to race, class, sex, gender or background.

We are part of a grand experiment to see if such if a nation, or any nation, conceived and dedicated toward to the proposition of equality can long endure.

King taught that to realize dreams and bend the arc of history toward justice, you have to put in the work and be willing to labor no matter the risk.

He also taught that if you’re going to change the world, it helps to have a poet in your back pocket.