Every year on Martin Luther King Day, Garry Moore leaves us an in-depth look at the holiday through the eyes of people in here Central Illinois.

This year, he sat down with Sociology professor Doctor Venus Evans Winters about how King's son is carrying on his father's legacy.

A young boy stares into the casket of his deceased father. It is 1968. The boy is Martin Luther King III.

"He knows what happens when a boy loses a father to violence. Not at the hands of another African man, but at the hands of those who have power and privilege. And how his mother had to cope with being a single parent overnight...along with being African American woman."

About two weeks before his father's assassination, Martin King III would accompany the Civil Rights leader to the rural south on a campaign to bring light to the nation's poor.

Now almost 40 years later, he has taken up his father's legacy, founding an organization called Realizing the Dream, with the purpose of ending poverty.

Dr. Venus Evans-WInters said, "The legacy that his son is picking up is what King is often forgotten for, which is his struggle for the working poor, right? Or the economic struggles we have in the U.S. as it relates to Capitalism. Sometimes we forget that we're in this struggle together. Sometimes we forget that and King also tried to make that an issue too. He was basically knocking on the door of the white working class and saying 'hey you realize the same thing that happened to these blacks, low and middle income blacks, might happen to you next."

A diagnosis of black life in America over the past four decades is a mixed story of socio economic progress and some stifling setbacks.

While the entire nation copes with a housing crisis, near recession and a global job market, the income gap between blacks and whites has actually widened.

King's dream of a government that invests more in people and less on military ventures is.

"Um, it's a dream, but it can become reality. Again, I think that he was being hopeful. Can we ever be non violent? We're moving more toward violence as a means to an end. You don't agree with me, I'm gonna use my gun. It worked with the President. It worked with other Presidents, outside of the U.S."

In recent days, those who would be President have invoked King's name.

The son saying Hillary Clinton made a mistake but believes she meant no harm when she made statements that some decoded as downplaying his father's legacy.

And while the race has exposed rifts in the black community, through King's lens, the viable candidacies of Barack Obama and Clinton is seen by some as both a real test of America's tolerance as well as shining examples of how the highest goals can be realized.

But can any President or King's son for that matter eliminate poverty and war.

"It's a tough question just because we want to be hopeful."

The audacity of hope.

The Illinois Wesleyan Sociologist said, "The audacity of hope (laughs) to quote Obama, right. We want to be hopeful and my own paradigm requires that I be hopeful. In order for me to thrive, whether I'm in academia, as a parent, as a social activist, if I give up hope then there's nothing to really work for or towards. So if I had to look at it as the glass is half full, this is the time."

A time for Martin King's legacy.