Just as the Vice President, white society likes to distort who Martin Luther King Jr. was, and what he believed in.
You'll hear people talk about his "I Have A Dream" speech, and for good reason. It is a monumental moment in history, and probably the most iconic movement of the Civil Rights movement.
But MLK stood for more than just the right of an African American to vote, and be treated equally under the law.
MLK was a harsh critic of the Vietnam War, and the hypocrisy in which it represented.
On March 9, 1965, MLK stated that “millions of dollars can be spent every day to hold troops in South Viet Nam and our country cannot protect the rights of Negroes in Selma.”
From 1965 to the time of his death, MLK gave a number of speeches condemning the war.
Here's a full speech, Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break the Silence, April 4, 1967:
In this speech, MLK declared that the United States government was "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."
In his speech, he declared that the Vietnam War destroyed the hope of social programs that was going to help poor:
"Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything on a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such."
His condemnation of the Vietnam War lost him support from the press.
In an article titled "A Tragedy," The Washington Post declared that his Beyond Vietnam speech “diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country, and to his people.”
But it wasn't just the press, or white people who didn't like MLK being an outspoken critic of the war.
Another aspect of MLK that people like to conveniently ignore about him was his views on economics.
“If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she too will go to hell,” said MLK in a speech at Bishop Charles Mason Temple of the Church of God in Christ, two weeks before he was assassinated.
In 1961, MLK said: “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.”
In 1966, he told his staff: “You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism.”
A family member made the comment to me that liberals indoctrinate students in school. He's not wrong, but he's also not right.
The version of MLK that I was taught was in essence, that of a capitalist.
It was fine to learn about the MLK that teaches us that racism is bad, but they don't teach us about the MLK that led to him being widely disliked by the time he was assassinated.
“Capitalism forgets that life is social. And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis.”
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