The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream that changed the nation—a dream of equal rights that now has the power of law. And on Monday, Illinois joined the nation in honoring his legacy.

“Yes, Martin, you’re gone, but your dream is still a reality,” said Genella Bond, who organized a prayer breakfast at the Salvation Army in Decatur to commemorate King’s birthday, a national holiday.

King, who would have been 60 on Sunday, was assassinated nearly 21 years ago in Memphis.

“I remember a survivor of the Holocaust saying that unless we remember our past, our past will become our future,” Bond said after the breakfast, which was attended by more than 350 people.

“This is why we must celebrate Dr. King’s birthday … because we must not let the nation go back to (oppression of blacks),” she said.

King’s tactic of nonviolent resistance, using marches and boycotts, united and focused the U.S. civil rights movement into an overwhelming force. Jailed many times, he was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 1964.

While laws have changed to further equal rights, some feel reality falls far short of King’s dream.

“I find that a lot of us are dreaming that we have reached the promised land because of a job, where we live or our economic status,” said Johnny Scott, president of the East St. Louis chapter of the NAACP, on Sunday.

“But until all of us reach the promised land we are not a free people.”

The Rev. O.C. Nicks of Mt. Moriah Baptist Church in Chicago stressed that King’s dream was not just for blacks.

“Dr. King’s dream was for humanity,” Nicks said.

With global application of his vision in mind, demonstrators gathered outside offices of the South African consulate in Chicago to protest apartheid, the system of formalized racial segregation that enables that country’s white minority to subjugate the black majority.

“Dr. King took the people to the streets … that’s why we are on the streets today,” said Joan Gerig of the First Church of the Brethren, one of the apartheid protesters.