And he's not been dead long enough, honestly

That's not something I considered. It's easy to forget that MLK and the whole civil rights era was a bit more than a generation or two ago.

Makes me think of my grandma talking about him along the lines of: "I just felt so sorry for those black people, I didn't like MLK for riling them up", or an old teacher talking about living in an era of segregated drinking fountains.

I agree that the small steps are important, but it is also true that a position on the dollar is as much about public approval and recognition as it is about the work you did and how good a person you are.

As for the idea of the an ideal we lumber towards, I disagree. I think we are always at our "ideal" and as time passes that ideal shifts, and we look at the old ideals as incorrect. The cycle, so far as I am aware, will never end. We are always "one step behind the ideal world" before we realize things changed again and there is another step to take.

Not necessarily towards our modern ideal of progress either, there will come a day that we move to a less ideal world from our modern viewpoint, and I suspect that shift will be based on the infringement of privacy.