Martin Luther King Jr., revered as a 'national' hero in US today, is forgotten as a radical

Martin Luther King Jr. was not just the safe-for-all-political-stripes civil-rights activist he is often portrayed as today. He was never just the "I Have a Dream" speech. He was an antiwar, anti-materialist activist whose views on American power would shock many of the same politicians who now scramble to sing his praises.

King's more radical worldview came out clearly in a speech to an overflow crowd of more than 3,000 people at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967. "The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: 'A time comes when silence is betrayal,' " he began. It wasn't about the civil-rights movement - not directly, at least. "That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam."

He continued, in a speech called "Beyond Vietnam":

King also addressed the idea that his advocacy of nonviolence at home should extend to the rest of the world:

Martin Luther King Jr. is now hailed by politicians of all stripes, including a president who is now defending a massive government spying program. In his speech announcing reforms to the NSA's bulk collection of data, Obama explicitly cited MLK, and acknowledged the historical strain:

It's impossible to imagine any politician today celebrating King's full range of beliefs, or using a fully realized King as a way to promote their own. Even the 1963 March on Washington itself was more radical than it is often remembered as being, having been largely designed by A. Philip Randolph, a union leader, and Bayard Rustin, a gay pacifist and World War II conscientious objector.

The man who said that his dream of equality was "deeply rooted in the American Dream" also believed the American government, with what he saw as its weapons testing in Vietnam, was on par with "the Germans [who] tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe." In the same speech, King said that, if U.S. actions were to continue, "there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam."

The radicalism of the 1967 speech didn't just extend to Vietnam. King called for the U.S. to "undergo a radical revolution of values," saying that "we must rapidly begin the shift from a 'thing-oriented' society to a 'person-oriented' society." He continued:

When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death," he said.

The speech, and King's stance on Vietnam more generally, were not particularly well received by major media outlets at the time. magazine called the speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi." wrote that King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people." An April 7, 1963, a editorial titled "Dr. King's Error" took a wider view:

Dr. King explicitly addressed such questions in his April speech:

As he himself said, King was always more than "I Have a Dream." His other stances - from economic justice to Vietnam - are just more controversial. That doesn't mean that they deserve to be forgotten. The total spectrum of his beliefs may not be as easy as "let freedom ring," but the full MLK was much larger than the safe-for-everyone caricature that is often presented today.

National Journal

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