Gunfire silenced and stilled one man 40 years ago, without ever fully arresting the progress of his cause.

He and his lessons are remembered while the violent who sought to repress the Civil Rights Movement tend to be forgotten, as if their names were being somehow borne away by the nature of their deeds.

As I write, I cannot recall who burned a small cross in front of North Carolina State University's Lee dormitory that night -- only the words and faces of other students who strove for peace and reconciliation then and afterward.

The courage of peacemakers has always been brought back to me by the muffled, never quite inaudible footfalls punctuating the loud ascendancy of the American right which followed Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination.

Those gentle taps and rustlings are Americans stepping forward without fanfare, choosing to emerge from the darkness Dr. King sought to dispel by faith, reason and nonviolent spiritual example.

Were he alive, Dr. King would, I suspect, hear the movement of their feet as the subtle melody of nonviolence.

Nonviolence is by nature surpassingly patient. It speaks to the fragment of our Creator which mirrors within all of us something of the original Craftsman. Nonviolence invites, and will not compel us to turn toward and follow the good in ourselves to the greater good we can embrace.

The faith-driven strategy of spirit-led inner reform, helped along from time to time by nonviolent civil disobedience, was our collective inoculation against the rise of a persistent American terrorism. As a result, there has never been a living rationalization for the false logic of repression which has stalked us these past four decades.

Instead, the nonviolence he lived and taught has been amplified by the response of Americans to it as their fellow citizens strove to live and through example teach the change for which they yearned.

Much as I love the song, it is not precisely speaking true that "We shall overcome." We are in our various ways deciding to be comfortably side by side, opening our eyes to see one another with new egalitarian clarity and conversing more freely.

The Americans of whom I write, who were once secure in their racism and other, related prejudice, were not exhausted and at last overcome.The persistent footfall I have heard these forty years is the sound of individuals freely answering the call of the good within them to the good offered them by Dr. King and his spiritual heirs.

Conscience by conscience, we have become a nation which willfully accepts a black man and a woman and an old man as presidential candidates and which is learning to reject the jingoism which distracted earlier generations.

Our ongoing change is I believe the highest honor we can offer the memory one who was assassinated when, knowing the risk, he stepped forward to speak to the needs of underpaid sanitation workers.