With protests mounting across the country to stop ICE and the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies, many pundits invoke Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement on the “right ways” to protest. And yet, most distort the substance of what King did and believed. Here are five lessons on the actual King for this Juneteenth:

1. King didn’t feel sufficient and was terrified in each police encounter. From the Montgomery bus boycott to Memphis, King felt inadequate to the task. But he pushed forward. When the other ministers were too scared to speak at the first mass meeting in Montgomery, the 26-year-old King said he would. He was shaking. But he went anyway. Eight weeks later, his house was bombed with wife Coretta and baby Yolanda in it. Coretta managed to get them out safely. Martin’s and Coretta’s fathers both came down to urge them to get out of Montgomery—or at least for Coretta and the baby to leave. She refused. One of the greatest gifts both Kings possessed was the ability to move forward despite their fear. They had decided they would not be bound by the limits society imposed, but that didn’t make it easy.

King also knew what the police could do; he was arrested 29 times over his life and had to fight his fear in each encounter. Over the years, police took him for joy rides, put him in a half nelson and slammed him down on a counter, choked him, kicked him in the back, picked him up by his pants, shackled and chained him to a police car floor for hours, and tightened his restraints further when he complained they were too tight. King condemned the push for increased law enforcement in Black communities and particularly around Black protest. “Many Americans would like to have a nation which is a democracy for white Americans but simultaneously a dictatorship over Black Americans,” King stressed in a 1967 meeting with white politicians in Atlanta.

2. Coretta Scott King was his political partner. Coretta Scott was more of a political activist than King when they met in grad school in Boston. As a student at Antioch, she had supported the Progressive Party’s third-party challenge for the presidency in 1948, decrying segregation at home and Cold War militarism abroad and supporting Henry Wallace for president. Through her Progressive Party activities, she met Paul Robeson and Bayard Rustin years before meeting King.

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From their first date, he was smitten; he’d never met a woman like her. Admiring the activist-intellectual she already was, he moved toward her politics and activism, and she gravitated toward his vision and determination. Coretta Scott King explained that he “let me be myself and that meant I always expressed my views.” Indeed, she was “the family leader” on issues of global peace—and out publicly against the War in Vietnam years before him. When Coretta spoke at one of the first big anti-war mobilizations at Madison Square Garden in 1965, a reporter asked Dr. King if he’d educated her. “No,” he replied, “she educated me.”

3. It wasn’t about knowing what would work. Exposing injustice was essential. Part of King’s gift was to show, by example, that such conditions were an affront to God, that each individual was powerful and action was necessary, even if you might not prevail. During a radio interview, a Chicago student who had been arrested the previous year protesting the city’s school segregation called in to ask King if they had achieved anything tangible. Her friends were dismissive, and she felt more had been accomplished in the South. Taking the question seriously, King underlined the power of exposing injustice:

You did accomplish something, and I hope you won’t be discouraged.… If there had not been a movement last summer, the conditions in the schools would continue without anybody raising a question or raising a voice against it.… Often you are accomplishing much more than you can see at the moment. because you are at the heart of the situation.… Many of the things we are going to be able to do now…[are] because the atmosphere was created last summer for a building of a vibrant movement to end discrimination, injustice, slum and slumism in the city of Chicago.

4. Dr. King didn’t only welcome the well-dressed and well-mannered. Everyone had a role to play. King spent hundreds of hours in Chicago working with gang members, seeing their leadership potential. Their mutual love and respect for him and he for them, even if they didn’t always agree, comes through. “You couldn’t help but fall in love with him,” Vice Lords leader Lawrence Johnson explained. Blackstone Rangers leader Jeff Fort underlined how King saw a “wealth” in street organizations and stressed how deeply he listened to them. But we are so used to seeing photos of King at the podium and pulpit that his gift as a listener has fallen out of current understandings of him.

This work was demonized by city officials and many in the media—and disdained by some in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference who didn’t like “these gangbangers.” But King stuck with it. According to Fort, King wanted to “change how the government was treating his Black and poor people, [and] he wanted to change the violence that Black people were inflicting upon themselves.” In June 1966, King and the SCLC convened the Turfmasters First Annual Conference, a summit that brought together 200 gang members from 18 different Chicago gangs—Black, white, Native American, Mexican, and Puerto Rican. The aim was to end violence between gangs and turn their energy to advocacy for their community needs. Many gang members served as marshals in the marches of summer 1966 that sought to break open Chicago’s many sundown neighborhoods. They faced massive white violence and remained nonviolent, even bringing baseball mitts to catch the rocks and bottles being thrown at them. And they went to DC in 1968 to carry on the Poor People’s Campaign that King had been building when he was assassinated.

5. King believed in the necessity of disruption. King’s nonviolence wasn’t just marches and lunch counter sit-ins but school boycotts, rent strikes, and the disruption of city and business life because injustice was comfortable for too many people. Confronting his allies on their complicities, King decried the tendency “of looking sympathetically at all sides that it fails to become committed to either side.” In 1960, King, Rustin, and A. Phillip Randolph prepared to hold a March on the Conventions to hold both the Democratic and Republican parties accountable to Black interests. Representative Adam Clayton Powell and NAACP leader Roy Wilkins were livid that they were targeting the Democratic Party. But they pushed forward anyway.

In the winter of 1964, Brooklyn CORE decided to call for a stall-in on highways leading to the opening of the World’s Fair in New York City to highlight the city’s rampant inequality. Having protested for years around school segregation, housing segregation, and job discrimination with little change, their message was clear: “We want jobs now, integrated quality education, [and an] end [to] slum housing.” City leaders were outraged. Many Black and white moderates furiously attacked the idea of the stall-in and called on King to do the same. But King refused: “We do not need allies who are more devoted to order than to justice,” King explained. “I hear a lot of talk these days about our direct-action talk alienating former friends.… If our direct-action programs alienate so-called friends…they never were really our friends.” King was tired of commentators scolding Black people for being so angry: “Mass civil disobedience can use rage as a constructive and creative force. It is purposeless to tell Negroes they should not be enraged when they should be.”

Newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post that were covering Southern movements with clarity and rigor portrayed Northern activists (including King) who challenged segregation and police brutality at home as “unreasonable,” “dangerous,” and “self-defeating.” Northern politicians and editors who praised King when “I was safe from them in the South” called him an outside agitator and made clear that he was not welcome when he challenged injustice in their own cities. Over and over, the media described nonviolent disruptive protests like the stall-in and the 1964 New York City school boycott as “violent,” even though they harmed no persons or property.

The civil rights movement provides crucial lessons on how we move forward today: We don’t know what will work but need to act anyway; everyone, everyone has a role to play; and our tactics, just like King’s, will be cast as unreasonable, violent, and self-defeating—but we keep going anyway. But that’s only if learn the actual history of Martin Luther King Jr. and not some caricature.