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During racially tense moments that have beset the nation recently, many Americans have longed for President Barack Obama to display some of the passion and soaring rhetoric that made the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. a civil rights legend.

But the messages of restraint Obama has given in response to outcry over police violence are the same ones he has been dispensing for 20 to 30 years, echoes of thoughts he has had ever since he was a young community organizer in Chicago. His central tenets: Don't give in to anger and violence, work to improve not destroy the legal system, and accept that change will come and things are getting better, albeit more slowly than many would like.

Obama's views on race have remained remarkably consistent, and recent events appear to have affirmed rather than altered those views.

The president is likely to touch on race again Tuesday during his State of the Union address, and if so, he will probably acknowledge that on race, as on the economy, a "resurgent America" has made great progress but still requires greater inclusiveness.

Rather than making pressing demands for economic justice like those that defined King's crusade, Obama will make a pitch for a tax package that will aid lower- and middle-class households and serve as modest tools for economic advancement for whites and blacks.

Yet on this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, nearly 47 years after his assassination, the nation and the president are still struggling with issues of race and discrimination, issues Obama has never denied but has long sought to de-emphasize.

In 2009, Obama replaced a bust of Winston Churchill in the Oval Office with one of King, but a study by University of Pennsylvania researcher Daniel Gillion found that Obama talked about race less in his first two years of office than any Democratic president at least since John F. Kennedy.

Whereas King rode a crest of growing black anger and channeled it into peaceful civil disobedience, Obama came of age as the civil rights movement splintered and dissipated.

King's speeches in the 1960s were clarion calls for justice, action and civil disobedience.

Obama, especially as people feared the possibility of riots in cities across the country, has sounded calls for restraint, lawful demonstrations, commissions of inquiry and slow, steady progress toward reform.

"It's important to recognize, as painful as these incidents are, we can't equate what is happening now to what was happening 50 years ago," Obama said during an interview on BET, talking about why he wasn't more aggressive in his statements earlier. "And the reason it's important for us to understand progress has been made is that then gives us hope that we can make even more progress."

In "Dreams From My Father," written when he was still in his early 30s and fresh out of Harvard Law School, Obama distanced himself from those who believed that "the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat."

He warned that the outlook of blacks in the late 1970s and 1980s too often "dissipated into an attitude rather than any concrete program, a collection of grievances."

Instead, a strong strain of optimism had taken hold of him. "We could tell this country where it was wrong, I would tell myself and any black friends who would listen, without ceasing to believe in its capacity for change," he wrote.