Today marks the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee.

It's a good time to reflect on his message, and to consider how we all can apply his extraordinary moral principles to the issues that confront us today.

The US and Bermuda are very different places than they were 40 years ago, and in terms of racial equality, much better places as well.

What Dr. King would have made of the world today can only be surmised, but one imagines it would be a mixture of joy at the progress that has been made, and disappointment that there is still such a long way to go.

No doubt he would be pleased to see how successful Barack Obama's presidential candidacy has been, and one would imagine he would be quietly praying for him to be the Democratic nominee and to be successful in the November general election in the US.

The very idea that a black politician, albeit one of mixed racial heritage, would be seen as a genuinely viable candidate for the Presidency of the most powerful nation in the world, would have seemed utterly unlikely just four decades ago.

It is probably fair to say that no black US politician has grasped the essential tenets of Dr. King's message of tolerance and belief in the basic dignity of all humans as Sen. Obama, while bringing that same message to face 21st Century realities.

But Sen. Obama's speech last month in Philadelphia also demonstrates that the concerns that energised Dr. King are still alive.

Dr. King's powerful statement that people should be judged by the content of their character and not the colour of their skin is inarguable today. Indded, it is remarkable today to think that there could ever have been any question about it.

But it is also true that in the months before his death, Dr. King was becoming more and more convinced that simple legislative changes abolishing discrimination, recognising voter equality and so on would not be enough to bring about genuine equality between the races, either in the US or anywhere else in the world.

That is the issue which the US and Bermuda are still grappling with; not over the fact that by almost any economic or social measure blacks (and in the US, other minorities) lag behind whites, but how to bridge the gap.

For 40-odd years, the US has attempted to implement affirmative action with mixed results. On the one hand, it has brought tremendous benefits to a small number of people. But overall, the gap remains. And today, questions as basic as whether integrated schools benefit all remain up for debate.

And, as Sen. Obama stated in his speech in Philadelphia last month, affirmative action programmes have also caused resentment among whites who do not consider themselves to be particuarly privileged compared to other racial groups.

Bermuda, which has traditionally shied away from explicit affirmative action, faces much the same problems and debates.

There should be no doubt, however, that the likelihood of under-achievement begins not in the workplace, but literally from birth.

Strong, stable families, safe neighbourhoods, a commitment to learning, both at home and in school, all set the foundation for success. A lack of those factors puts anyone – black or white – on an extremely shaky foundation, in which meeting expectations, let alone exceeding them, is highly unlikely.

We cannot afford to handicap our children from birth, but we do.

Dr. King, was also of course, the inheritor of the mantle of non-violence from Mahatma Gandhi, and would no doubt have recoiled from both the state-backed violence of war, and of the violence of the streets that has affected the US and, (fortunately) to a slightly lesser extent, Bermuda.

That violence in the streets is caused at least in part by poverty and alienation would be obvious to Dr. King. And he might have better answers than we seem to.

And as a man who had no great interest in personal wealth, Dr. King may also have been unhappy about the materialism that for too many of us, is used to fill the spiritual gap in our lives.

Today is a good to day to look back at the principles by which Dr. King lived, and to make our own effort to make them our own. We would be a better society if we did.