Classic TV Clips Channel – By classic_tv_clips

The great leader is not the safe-for-all-political stripes hero he is sometimes portrayed as.

He was never just the “I Have a Dream” speech.

He was an anti-war, anti-materialist activist whose views on American power would shock many of the same politicians who are currently scrambling to sing his praises.

Dr. 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.

“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,'”

Martin Luther King Jr. is being hailed by politicians of all stripes on Wednesday, from a president who is considering military options in the Middle East.

Even the 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 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.”

“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.

Time magazine called the speech “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.”

The Washington Post wrote that King had “diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.”

A New York Times editorial titled “Dr. King’s Error” took a wider view:

Dr. King can only antagonize opinion in this country instead of winning recruits to the peace movement by recklessly comparing American military methods to those of the Nazis testing “new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe.” The facts are harsh, but they do not justify such slander ….

King explicitly addressed such questions in his April speech:

“Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don’t mix, they say. Aren’t you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment, or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.”

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, decades after his historic march, they deserve to be forgotten.

he 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.

Privacy

Public

Category

News & Politics

Licence

Public Domain Dedication

Language

English

Tags

Anti-war

MLK

Martin Luther King

New York City

Riverside Church