OG History is a Teen Vogue series where we unearth history not told through a white, cis-hetero-patriarchal lens. In this installment, writer Jenn M. Jackson explores the radical nature of Martin Luther King Jr., whose legacy, she says, was whitewashed over time.

The earliest lesson I learned about Martin Luther King Jr. was that he had “a dream.” Delivered in his most well-known speech at the 1963 March on Washington, as posed to me and as I understood clearly in my adolescent mind, that dream was a colorblind one.

That manufactured perspective — often told to young children and supported by mainstream, predominantly white commentators — was focused on erasing the divisions between black and white people, not necessarily by blaming white people for their participation in systems of anti-black racism, but by moving beyond racial difference altogether.

But that was never actually King’s dream. His was much more radical than that.

In 1954, King was finishing a doctoral dissertation at Boston University. Soon he was thrust into the political limelight early on in his career as a 25-year-old pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. The political moment necessitated a radical approach to politics — he was pastoring as Brown v. Board of Education was decided, effectively ending legal segregation in the United States.

This monumental civil rights win, and the promise of freedom of public movement for black Americans, signaled an era of struggle and triumph for King and those who believed in his nonviolent cause. On the heels of Brown, King was just 26 when he helped facilitate and lead the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which started on December 5, 1955, and lasted over a year.

It is estimated that the Montgomery bus lines lost 30,000 to 40,000 bus fares each day because of the boycott. For 381 days, boycotters walked or carpooled to and from their destinations. The boycott and a legal challenge forced the Montgomery City Lines bus company to desegregate their fleet by November 1956, which sparked years of nonviolent organizing in the South. It was King’s unconventional engagement tactics, organizing black communities through “direct actions” on buses, at lunch counters, libraries, and many other public facilities, that quickly elevated his name among national movement circles and mainstream media alike.

But this effort didn’t spring forth from nothing. Black women and girls like 15-year-old Claudette Colvin and 42-year-old Rosa Parks first refused to obey segregation laws on Montgomery buses that relegated black riders to the back rows and mandated they give up their seats to white riders, and had been gaining attention before its start. And the pressure-cooker–like conditions of many Southern cities stoked the flames of a burgeoning civil rights movement galvanized by the gruesome kidnapping and murder of 14-year-old Chicago-born Emmett Till while visiting family in Money, Mississippi, in August 1955. Till’s murder had a profound effect on King, as it represented the horrors of the anti-black racism he was bracing himself to stand against.

By 1963, the year four little girls were killed in cold blood by KKK members, King had already made frequent trips to Birmingham, Alabama, even getting arrested during his nonviolent protests of racial segregation with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

The sanitized version of King’s life and work — the colorblind “I have a dream” narrative — often fails to acknowledge how King’s increasing profile as a radical, anti-racist organizer drew antagonism from the FBI and its director at the time, J. Edgar Hoover, which began as early as 1964, four years before he was assassinated.