The observance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday each year kicks off the busiest season for African-American public speakers. After a string of MLK speeches, we quickly head into Black History Month or what my friend Michael Eric Dyson calls Negro Employment Month.

I have three King Day speeches: at Voorhees College in Denmark, S.C. this Thursday, at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. on Friday and at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. on Monday. As I prepared for my King observance presentations – and rested up for the February marathon – I reflected not only on Dr. King’s life, but how grueling his travel schedule was each year.

In an interview with Playboy magazine, Dr. King disclosed that he worked 20-hour days, traveled 325,000 miles a year, giving 450 speeches. Most of those speeches were not on university campuses; many were in small towns where African-Americans were fighting to remove racial barriers. I know because he spoke at a Black church in my hometown, Tuscaloosa, Ala., when I was a teenager.

I had never heard a speaker as eloquent as Dr. King. And I still haven’t. He spoke without notes and used a rich vocabulary. Andrew Young, one his top aides, would later remark that Dr. King used words so large that we didn’t know what they meant – and nor did White people.

Unlike some national figures who seem impatient when dealing with what we once called the common man (and woman), Dr. King always found time for people with Ph.Ds or no Ds. He didn’t care whether the worker held jobs that were white collar, blue collar or no collar.

In one of the selections in “A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” edited by James M. Washington, King told of the story of two men who had flown to Atlanta to meet with a Black civil rights leader.

“Before they could begin to talk, the porter sweeping the floor drew the local leader aside to talk about a matter that troubled him. After fifteen minutes had passed, one of the visitors said bitterly to his companion, ‘I am just too busy for this kind of nonsense. I haven’t come a thousand miles to sit and wait while he talks to a porter.’ The other replied, ‘When the day comes that he stops having time to talk to a porter, on that day I will not have the time to come one mile to see him.’”

Of the thousands of letters that poured into the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) office every day, many of them were answered by the SCLC president. I know this from personal experience. One of my proudest possessions is a letter from King. It doesn’t matter that it was probably a form letter and it doesn’t matter that his signature was stamped. It matters only that he cared enough to reply.

Next Monday, George W. Bush, like Ronald Reagan before him, will claim to be acting in the spirit of Dr. King. Bush will praise the slain human rights leader with a straight face even though he has no domestic program to speak of and opposes affirmative action, a program strongly favored by Dr. King.

In an interview with “Playboy” magazine, King was asked: “Do you feel it’s fair to request a multi-billion-dollar program of preferential treatment for the Negro, or for any other minority group?”

King responded: “I do indeed. Can any fair-minded citizen deny that the Negro has been deprived? Few people reflect that for two centuries the Negro was enslaved, robbed of any wages – potential accrued wealth which would have been the legacy of his descendants. All of America’s wealth today could not adequately compensate its Negroes for centuries of exploitation and humiliation…”

Given the United States' current involvement in Iraq, this is as good a time as any to remember that King received his harshest criticism – from Whites and Black civil rights leaders – for opposing the war in Vietnam. For his courage, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway. At home, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover tapped his phones, planted spies in SCLC, tried to destroy his marriage by sending compromising tapes to his wife and even urged Dr. King to commit suicide.

As we observe Dr. King’s birthday this year, we should ignore all the speakers who will pretend to tell us what Dr. King would say or think were he alive today. Instead, use King’s life as our model. That speaks louder that any words he or anyone claiming to speak for him can utter.