We were left wondering Saturday if Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream had been forgotten.

A scant 50 people showed up for a walk in remembrance of King that preceded a parade that drew thousands celebrating Super Bowl XLIX star Malcolm Butler.

Butler’s accomplishment, as we have said before, is amazing. We take nothing away from him. His journey from serving up fried chicken from a drive-through window to Hero of the Super Bowl is an inspiration to us all.

Butler deserved the thousands of people gathered in the streets in his honor, but so did King. Yet a crowd less than a tenth of the size of the one congregated on Washington Street made the short walk from the Warren County Courthouse to the monument in his honor several blocks to the northeast.

King’s legacy has survived, but is it unfortunately fading? Protests in the aftermath of the deaths of unarmed black men by white police officers turned violent last year. Rioting became commonplace in Ferguson, Mo. That’s certainly not King’s dream.

“My father’s approach to the most brutal and unambiguous social injustices during the civil rights struggle was rooted in nonviolence as a morally and tactically correct response,” Martin Luther King III told The Washington Times. “In no way do I, nor would my father, condone any ‘ends justify the means’ behavior.”

What King’s dream called for was a multi-racial group working together in peace and harmony to make the world a better place. We do see some racial unity in our community, but there is a long way to go.

Here, when we honor King’s legacy, the crowd is multi-racial, but usually incredibly lopsided. At a racial reconciliation picnic last year — what a better way to foster healing and honor King’s legacy — blacks outnumbered whites about 15 to 1. Saturday’s march was no different.

Perhaps it is that many whites feel King is an icon of black history. Yet, pigeonholing King in such a way discounts that he is an icon of 20th century American history. His struggles and his story are truly American and should remind us that even in our darkest hours, there is a beacon of hope.

King came here in 1964 where he spoke at Pleasant Green Baptist Church on Bowman Avenue. He wanted blacks to register to vote and allow their voices to be heard through the ballot box.

But today, neither blacks or whites seem terribly interested in voting. Less than 5,000 votes were cast in the most recent special election runoff for circuit clerk — an office that had been plagued by corruption, and one which is much more influential over local lives than president or senator.

So where do we go from here, and how do we make King’s dream a reality? Events like Saturday’s march and the picnic we mentioned before are good places to start, but not if no one is interested.