Today, on Martin Luther King Jr.’s federal holiday, many will write of Dr. King’s dream for equality for all people and his heroic leadership that inspired very real progressive change in our country’s laws and culture. Most will politely ignore the more radical currents of Dr. King’s vision, his activism for living wage jobs as a human right and an end to U.S. imperialism abroad, ideas that remain outside mainstream American thought to this day.
In the latter years of his life, Dr. King, already a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, frequently spoke publicly of the three evils holding back his society: racism, poverty and militarism. In one controversial speech,“Beyond Vietnam,” delivered on April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination and almost six years before U.S. troops withdrew from Vietnam, Dr. King called his government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” He argued national investment in the war had already doomed President Lyndon Johnson’s ‘War on Poverty’ to failure—a claim that the New York Times objected forcefully. In the address, Dr. King implored the necessity for the nation to undergo a “radical revolution of values,” explaining, “We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives, and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
The speech prompted President Johnson to revoke Dr. King’s standing invitation to the White House. According to Tavis Smiley, it also earned Dr. King denunciations from 168 major newspapers the next day, including the Pittsburgh Courier, a leading black newspaper. Dr. King continued in his final year, now an unpopular public figure, to support workers around the country—he was in Memphis, where he was assassinated, in support of striking public sanitation employees. He organized a Poor People’s Campaign, often at odds with the Southern Christian Leadership Council that he helped to create, advocating for a Freedom Budget that sought to use the public treasury to extend genuine economic opportunity and material security to all Americans. After peaking at fourth on Gallup’s 1964 list of Most Admired Men, Dr. King had disappeared from the list by 1967. He died with disapproval ratings similar to those enjoyed by George W. Bush upon his exit from office. Yet, in a Gallup poll conducted in 1999 to determine the most admired Americans of the 20th century, Dr. King is listed second. Unpopular in his time for challenging mainstream opinions of U.S. poverty and militarism, Dr. King is sanitized in our cultural memory, stripped of the radical roots of his values. He is now loved in death by the same economic-political establishment he opposed in life.
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Dr. King’s social critique did not shy away from identifying causes of the economic inequality that underscores racial and social inequality. He called out a military-corporate alliance, arguing, “This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary actions in Guatemala,” and in Indonesia, Cambodia, Venezuela and Peru throughout the 1960s. One day, Dr. King warned, “[We] will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no consideration for the social betterment of the countries and say this is not just.”